What a peculiar Tory conference backdrop

The staging of Conservative Party conferences was transformed under Margaret Thatcher with the help of Harvey Thomas, who'd previously been involved in organising Billy Graham's crusades to the UK.

One innovation, later copied by other parties, was to seat other delegates out of sight so that they couldn't be seen behind the speaker. This had the advantage of reducing potential distractions and of preventing the mass audience from being able to monitor how colleagues were reacting to a speech

Before Labour followed suit, for example, sitting behind Neil Kinnock during his leader's speech were Dennis Skinner and Alice Mahon, chatting and shaking their heads as some of the things he was saying.

Then there as the classic Newsnight interview in which Peter Snow took Frances Pym to task for not applauding in the right places and/or vigorously enough (as can be seen HERE).

This year's Tory conference managers have come up with an innovation that I don't understand and have yet to hear explained. Yesterday, William Hague got up to speak in front of an anonymous townscape. Manchester? A typical Tory suburb? Middle England? Or just what is it supposed to symbolise?

Whatever the answer, it certainly got me (and probably anyone else who was watching too) wondering what they're trying to tell us - thereby distracting us from concentrating as closely as we should have been doing on what he was actually saying (which could, I suppose, be the whole point of it).



Today, when George Osborne appeared, the same background seemed to have moved in closer behind the podium, which has got me wondering whether, by the time David Cameron gives his leader's speech on Thursday, we'll see him perched on the roof of one of the houses.

P.S. Later on in the afternoon when it was Ken Clarke's turn, the backdrop had moved backwards again, closer to where it had been when William Hague was speaking. Is it symbolising some sort of pecking order we don't know about, is it random or will all be revealed by the end of the conference?

Surely it's time someone coached Cameron to use a teleprompter

At the risk of being accused of blogging about the same point too much, I was astonished to see a clip on the BBC TV's 10 o'clock News tonight of David Cameron speaking at the Tory Party conference in which he showed, yet again, that he's ignored the advice I gave him a year ago about spending far too much time looking at one of the autocue screens without looking in the other direction.

At one stage in today's excerpt, he spent 22 seconds looking to his right before managing to drag his head away to look at the other half of the audience on the other side of him.

It was also noticeable when he spoke at the Open University in May (HERE).

Nor is he alone, as Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown suffer from the same problem, as too did Margaret Thatcher (HERE).

What really flabbergasts me is that the advisors of politicians in such front-line positions don't seem to notice the problem or, if they do, they don't seem to think matters enough to do something about helping their bosses to solve it.

After all, reminding and coaching someone to remember to look from side to side more frequently is hardly the most difficult technique to get across, however busy and important their bosses might be.

What's more, there's plenty of time between now and his big speech on Thursday to fix it. And, needless to say, I shall be watching with interest.

Boris Johnson's funny bits

Today's heading is how ITN refers to the speech by the Mayor of London at the Conservative Party conference in their YouTube posting - and, as you can see from the full version (HERE), it only singles out some of the funny bits from 15 minutes that included some quite serious points not mentioned in this sequence.

Does it matter? Probably not, because if Boris Johnson wasn't such 'a character', he probably wouldn't have been elected to be Mayor of London in the first place.

Meanwhile, it's got me wondering whether I've seen any comparable 'characters' since I started taping and observing party conferencs 30 years ago.

So far, the best I've been able to come up so far are only 'possible' candidates, as they're not really in the same league on the comedy front: Rhodes Boyson (Conservative), Dennis Skinner (Labour) and Cyril Smith (Liberal).

I'd be fascinated to hear of any other nominations you might have.