By Will Dunn

Copyright newstatesman

Kemi Badenoch’s father once told her that she could only blame 20 per cent of what happened to her on other people; life is 80 per cent your fault. She recounted this in the Conservative Party Conference opening speech, about 80 per cent of which she spent blaming the party’s woes, and her own, on other people. Keir Starmer – the “human rights lawyer Prime Minister” – and the Labour Party had spoiled the Tories’ recent 14-year stretch in power before it could begin: “They spent all the money, sold the gold, piled up debt,” she railed (the UK added £1.5trn in borrowing under the 2010-24 Tory governments, more than doubling the national debt).

Badenoch declared her intention to “reject the politics… that everything is broken”, while also pointing out that everything is broken. Protests against Israel’s obliteration of Gaza were “carnivals of hatred… theatres of intimidation”, that the government indulged while its lawyers chased good people – she used the Americanism “veterans” – through the courts and “plotted” to “force everyone to carry Starmer’s digital ID”. The GB News camera cut to a man in a tweed jacket with a chin-strap beard, his mouth twitching and pursing as if he was trying to denude a chocolate raisin.

To understand if the ideas at the conference actually registered in the minds of right-wing voters, you have to inhabit the target audience. You have to sit where they sit. You have to spend two days watching GB News.

It seemed coverage of the Tories’ yearly jamboree would be overshadowed. On Sunday, a huge story had streaked across into the grumblesphere: the footballer turned woke property developer Gary Neville, had made a video. Not only had Neville taken down a Union Jack from one of his building sites, but he blamed division in British society on “angry, middle-aged white men”. The video was posted on Friday, but it was posted on LinkedIn, a website used exclusively by people who are either looking for a job or boasting about being promoted, so it took a couple of days before anyone noticed. By Monday morning the audiences of the right were shaking their jowls in high dudgeon.

The other distraction was that at the conference, there was rather too much seating available. In interview after interview, GB News hosts asked uncomfortable Tories: “Is it as quiet as it looks?” The two hotels closest to the conference still had rooms available on Sunday and Monday nights. Social media filled with pictures of rows of empty chairs. The oldest political party in the world, having spent most of the past century running this country, was reduced to addressing audiences that would, in some cases, have fit into three Toyota Previas.

The Tories had gathered to make a new offer to the people who used to vote for them. The offer was this: we’re going to clear up all the mess the Conservative Party made. And we’re going to do that by doing more of the things the Conservative Party did last time. Remember austerity? That went well! And so Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, was on stage to offer more of it. Surely, no sensible person would look at modern Britain and fail to conclude that what this place needs is £47bn in public spending cuts. Stride is made for GB News – pale, hefty, exasperated, gravel in his throat, a pint of Tribute in his stomach. Perhaps they’ll offer him a show when Kemi goes under: Mel Talks Money. He’d be great at it. As he promised to abolish business rates he stabbed his finger towards the podium: “End of!” he cried.

Chris Philp had a bucket of red meat to toss to the GB News audience: under a Tory government, a new “Removals Force” would deport people. Perhaps it would be like those videos from America, where masked soldiers jump out of trucks and abduct terrified people in front of their screaming families. Many of the people deported from the US are sent to prisons in El Salvador, but Badenoch would not say where the people the Tories plan to deport would go: “They will go back to where they came from,” she told the BBC.

Reform had only pledged to deport 600,000 people; Philp said he could do 750,000. He was going to take net migration negative. Maybe he could empty the whole country. GB News had not missed, however, that Philp was not only a minister in the Boris Johnson government that increased immigration to the highest level in Britain’s history – he was the immigration minister. And anyway, Martin Daubney had a more urgent question: “What planet is Gary Neville on?”

GB News begins each morning by playing the national anthem, but throughout the day a video repeats that begins with a few notes of gentle guitar. It’s the refrain from Holst’s “Jupiter” (or as this audience hears it, Cecil Spring Rice’s “I Vow to Thee, My Country”). A Union Jack undulates over the cobbled street of a small town, its shops unbowed by the dread forces of ecommerce and business rates. A string section joins in, the music swells – yes, the very hymn sung at the funerals of Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and Lady Di – and there is Portillo, and there is Farage, and there is a bad guy being chased through a migrant camp, and there is another Union Jack flying above a massive statue of a lion, and there is the slogan: The Fearless Champion of Britain.

This is the audience Badenoch’s party craves, the people for whom their policies seem written: leave the ECHR, scrap the Human Rights Act, burn the Climate Change Act, defund the benefits system. But GB News has already moved on. This is news delivered by former Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney, former Brexit Party candidate Michelle Dewberry, Reform MP Lee Anderson, Reform leader Nigel Farage, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who plans to advise Farage in government. They might agree with some Tory criticisms of the government – “Do you think the Labour Party are trying to control you?” asked Dewberry, staring into the camera – but are not interested in giving the Tories another shot. Defections of Tory councillors to Reform – 14 in all – were relayed with relish. The Westminster Reform councillor Laila Cunningham was asked to give her opinion of Lord Wolfson’s report into immigration: “I don’t believe in reports,” she declared.

The one thing this conference had in common with Labour’s was that the party leader got less attention than the person plotting to depose them. Badenoch’s would-be replacement, Robert Jenrick, had been kept off the cover of the programme, presumably in case he went Full Brutus before the event finished. On the second day, an audio recording of Jenrick complaining that in an hour and a half of filming (with GB News) in an area of Birmingham he described as “as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country”, he “didn’t see another white face”. He did not apologise for these comments.

Jenrick’s speech was the one GB News was waiting for. Banners announcing its imminence streamed across the screen. He held aloft a wig, “something we should all respect and revere” – but which now represented “dozens of judges with links to open-borders charities”. In Jenrickland, judges would be political appointees, immigration tribunals would be abolished. But this was also a speech to party members and campaigners, delivered in the style of someone who assumed they would at some point be their leader. “A very powerful speech,” declared Nana Akua, adding: “Mmmmm.” A Tory member leaving the hall told GB News political editor Christopher Hope: “That was my style of politics.”

A YouGov poll that morning had found that most Tory members do not think Badenoch should lead the party into the next election, and picked Jenrick as her most popular replacement. Crucially for the Fearless Defender of Britain, he has not ruled out a pact with Reform. Before long, however, it was back to the real question: what the bloody hell is Gary Neville up to?

[Further reading: At Labour conference, the main character was Farage]