Tories stopped fantasising about the rope because they accepted that those days were gone and it was time to move on. But all parties need a rallying cry, something to stir the blood, and it was George Osborne, who had been so keen to move on from IDS, who found it.

A decade on from that Blackpool debacle, Chancellor Osborne delighted his party — and a fair few voters — by announcing a Tory war on welfare.

“Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits? We speak for that worker,” he declared.

Two years later, he was back on the conference stage announcing the biggest cut of the austerity age, the benefits freeze.

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By James Kirkup

And now, six years, two prime ministers and one pandemic virus later, where do the Tories stand on welfare? And where will they go next? Perhaps it’s a good thing for the Conservatives that they aren’t having a proper conference this year, the sort of gathering where Osborne used to bash idle welfare recipients. Because the Tories don’t seem able to work out what they think about welfare today.

While a lot of people now agree that austerity was a mistake and welfare cuts went too far, it’s worth remembering that they were quite popular at the time. Osborne, after all, isn’t stupid: he knew his message — welfare claimants are idle scroungers who take your taxes — would play well with the wider public. It was one of many things he learned from Tony Blair.

The British Social Attitudes Survey, the gold-standard measure of national opinion, shows that in 1997, 28% of voters thought unemployment benefits were too high; 46% said they were too low. By the time the Coalition took office, 54% said welfare for the workless was too high, against 23% who said too low.

And now? The most recent BSA figures, for 2018, show opinion is back in balance: 39% said unemployment benefits are too high, and 35% say too low. And that was long before that little virus came along and put hundreds of thousands of British workers out of jobs.

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Britain’s emerging unemployment ordeal leaves Conservatives in a quandary. What do they think about welfare claimants now? What do they tell voters about those claimants? In other circumstances, a party might consult its guiding philosophy, its core ideas to help frame a response, but Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, which has been quite willing to abandon many of the old articles of Tory faith on economics and markets since taking office, doesn’t have much philosophy left to fall back on.

For a mock of the intellectual and political exam question fast approaching the Conservatives, consider the decision to maintain — or not — the £20 a week emergency increase to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit that was put in place in April. That’s scheduled to be withdrawn in April 2021, just as unemployment is likely to be nearing its peak. Conservatives including Stephen Crabb, former welfare secretary, and Mel Stride, Treasury select chair, say it should be extended, as does a serious coalition of anti-poverty groups led by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I agree, for what it’s worth.

How do Tories view claimants? The Osborne worldview saw them as idlers who had chosen not to work. Will Osborne’s successors continue to see claimants as undeserving types who chose their fate?

And whatever the evidence, some voters believed that, at least partly because that’s what they had been told, for several years, by their leaders. It wasn’t just David Cameron who talked about welfare “scroungers”. In 2011, Liam Byrne, then shadow work secretary, talked about Labour standing for “workers, not shirkers”.

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This was amplified via the media, and serious, well-organised efforts to make sure the public were served a regular diet of stories about excessive and fraudulent claims by undeserving claimants. I was a political reporter from 2001 until 2014 and remember the regular briefings and releases from CCHQ and its friendly organs such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, all striving to feed the narrative that welfare was too generous and claimants too lazy.

Not all Tories sang that song, of course. IDS fought Osborne for years to make UC more generous. Boris Johnson once said Coalition welfare cuts would impose “Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing” on the London he then led.

And slowly, the narrative of feckless welfare claimants faded. The Theresa May machine had no interest in maintaining it. Boris was even keener to declare the end of austerity, though his 2019 manifesto took a characteristically have your cake-and-flog-it-too view of welfare, promising both an end to the benefits freeze and a crackdown on “those who cheat the system”.

So what now for the Tories on welfare? The dark Osborne magic of castigating the feckless has faded away. What story will the Conservatives tell about the hundreds of thousands of people who are about to lose their jobs? Self-sufficiency and rugged individualism run deep in conservatism, as does the notion that people are largely responsible for their own fate. But how many Tory purists will be prepared to argue that the coronavirus jobless brought it on themselves by choosing the sort of jobs that get cut in a pandemic? It seems likely that at least some voters will regard the Covid-unemployed as jobless though no fault of their own; some might even regard those claimants as unemployed as a direct result of Government policy.

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And if you see those claimants as blameless, you need a better welfare provision for them. That’s a long way from Osborne’s scrounger-bashing, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for today’s Conservatives.

The logic of Johnson-Cummings Big State interventionism — and the political imperatives of retaining those Red Wall seats — would eventually transform the Covid-era Tories into the party of a much more generous welfare offer, at least for people with a solid history of work. Before the pandemic, there was a quiet debate beginning in Tory circles about a more contributory welfare regime, where people who have paid more in get more back when they need it. Offering higher rates of welfare to some workers who lose their jobs over Covid might have superficial attractions, and might play well with voters who like the idea of reciprocity. But some Tories worry about moving towards a system that divides claimants into the deserving and undeserving poor. This debate was only starting when the virus exploded. Expect to hear more of it when the smoke starts to clear.

Could the Tories emerge from the pandemic as a party that wants to do more for the unemployed? It might not be as implausible as it might seem at first glance.

No less an observer than Professor Sir John Curtice has concluded that public opinion on welfare issues is heavily influenced by the narrative offered by politicians: “Even though it might currently find itself in an unfamiliar policy position in expanding the welfare state, it is also open to the Conservative party to develop and secure support for its story as to how the welfare state should be run in future.”

The British labour market is in turmoil. Public opinion is up for grabs. The country needs a new story on welfare. Will the Conservatives try to write it, or fudge the issue and let Starmer inherit it?

The ballot-box dodgers of Westminster can’t avoid the voters forever. An election is imminent and just how the Conservatives intend to win it will become clearer this week. Obviously the big issue will be Brexit — and, in particular, the Remain Parliament’s attempt to force Boris into breaking his promise to get us out by 31 October.

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By Peter Franklin

I’ll leave it to others to speculate as to the manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres of the next month; I’d rather focus on that obscure branch of politics that specialists call ‘everything-else-apart-from-Brexit’.

The 2017 general election, let’s not forget, was also supposed to be a Brexit election – but in the end it had as much to do with social care, housing and, er, fox hunting. It, too, began with the Conservatives streets ahead and Labour in crisis. Again, that’s not how it finished.

Unlike previous shock results — 1992 or 2015 — there was no blaming the pollsters. Their polls may not have been perfect, but the support they showed for Theresa May at the outset of the campaign was no illusion.

The peculiar timing of the general election (which took place on 7 June) meant a super-long campaign period featuring the already scheduled local elections on 4 May. These provided some real results against which to test the polls. Sure enough, the Tories did well… gaining 563 councillors and overall control of 11 councils. Even more significant were the results of the metropolitan mayoral elections: Conservative candidates triumphed in the West Midlands and Teesside. Surely this was proof that May’s message of “an economy that works for everyone” was making in-roads into Labour territory.

But then the polls turned — picking up a genuine, rapid and devastating shift in public opinion. If he is to have any chance of winning a majority in the forthcoming contest, Boris Johnson needs to understand what went wrong last time.

So, here they are, the top five screw-ups made by May and her team — and how not to screw-up again:

1. Don’t mess with a change message

As I’ve said before, in every British general election since the banking crisis, the ‘change’ candidates have made the biggest impact. In 2010, that was Cameron (plus a brief eruption of Cleggmania); in 2015, it was Nigel Farage (even if the UKIP surge happened to work in Cameron’s favour); and in 2017, it was Jeremy Corbyn.

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The irony of the snap election is that it was Theresa May who started off as the change candidate — the purveyor of Nick Timothy’s reformist, anti-establishment ‘Erdington Conservatism’. But, inexplicably, the message was switched to one of continuity; “strong and stable” was the endlessly repeated refrain. Then, following the great manifesto debacle, they had her utter the undying words “nothing has changed”, while in the process of announcing a u-turn. The ineptitude was really quite impressive:  a double backflip of message mismanagement.

Johnson will achieve much the same effect if he implements the Benn Act, and goes to Brussels to beg for an extension. He will be sunk if he does it, and must resign before he’s forced to. After all, it’s not as if he’s in power now. Better fighting the next election as a defiant Leader of the Opposition than as a no-change Prime Minister.

2. Avoid men on horses

Through the botched manifesto was a disaster for Mrs May, it wasn’t where it all started going wrong.

No, that happened a few days before, when she stated her support for foxhunting and promised parliamentary time for a vote on its re-legalisation. It was one of the few Tory pledges that got noticed by the public, which was unfortunate given how how much they hated it. It was a gift to Labour and their ‘same old Tories’ line of attack. Nothing says ‘same old Tory’ like a posh man on horseback riding off to kill something.

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By Peter Franklin

Boris Johnson is our second Old Etonian Prime Minister in the space of a decade. Yet another member of an over-privileged, over-represented social class. However, such is the nature of his personality that his background seems no more than just one of his many quirks. To many voters, he’s not posh, he’s the one-and-only Boris.

He’s getting away with it, as he so often does. However, he shouldn’t under-estimate the power of symbols. Whether one likes it or not, fox hunting is a potent signifier of the oldest of old orders — one that was overthrown by democracy and to which most voters are atavistically hostile.

3. Remember the ‘rentquake’

In the aftermath of the shock election result, pundits and pollsters scrabbled for explanations. A favourite theory was the ‘youthquake’ – the idea that young voters turned out in force to vote for Corbyn.

In some constituencies, those such as Canterbury and Sheffield Hallam, the student vote certainly made a difference. However, psephologists such as Matt Singh, argue that the  ‘differential turnout’ that really made the difference was among the tenants of private landlords. This is a group of voters that in earlier decades would have expected to become home owners – but now find themselves priced off the housing ladder.

Having inherited a useless housing policy from Cameron and Osborne, May had no hope to offer them, which is why they turned so decisively to Corbyn and his promises of rent controls and a council house building programme. If the Conservative idea of a ‘property owning democracy’ is an impossible dream, people won’t vote for it.

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What can Boris Johnson do to reach out? He can tell them that socialist housing policy has always been anti-ownership and pro-ugly architecture. But he also needs to present a positive alternative — affordable, high-quality housing available where the jobs are.

That, of course, depends on not letting greedy speculators extract all the value every time planning permission is granted for development. Merely granting permission more often is not enough. The Conservatives face a choice: they can either take on the ‘landed interest’ or do without the next generation of Conservative voters.

4. Beware black swans!

An under-appreciated fact about the 2017 election is that the Conservative strategy succeeded. Its objective was to recruit ex-UKIP and other Leave voters and that’s exactly what happened, up to a point. While David Cameron won  just 36.9% of the vote in 2015, Theresa May pushed that up to 42.4% — despite the manifesto debacle and her abysmal performance on the campaign trail.

The reason why she gained votes but lost seats is that Jeremy Corbyn did an even better job of boosting his party’s vote share – from 30.4% to 40.0%. The Conservatives were undone by a ‘black swan’ event outside of their strategic considerations. The remote, but extremely consequential, possibility that Corbyn might excel at uniting non-Tory voters (and inspire them to turn out) was clearly not anticipated.

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For all the sophisticated micro-messaging that digital technology allows, the first question one has to ask about a campaign strategy is not “how do we fine tune it?”, but “what external factors could blow it up?”

I’m not predicting an exact replay this time round. Labour, as well alienating Leave-voting working class supporters, is also less likely to consolidate the Remain vote. The Lib Dems are back and making progress with Remainers; while the Greens, who were squeezed hard in 2017, have a new lease of life too.

However, this presents Boris with a new bank of potential black swans. Widespread tactical voting is one risk; a wholesale realignment of liberal Tory voters with the Lib Dems is another. He must be careful not to barrel around like Matteo Salvini in a blond wig. Not only would this mobilise Remain voters against him, it would put off a lot of Leave voters too — who are not the crude populists that some people imagine them to be.

5. Bring us sunshine

Last week was not the Prime Minister’s finest hour. However exaggerated and hypocritical the accusations made against him, however frustrated he must feel by his opponents’ tactics, he must not let his mood darken.

I think it’s fair to say we weren’t expecting a rip-roaring performance from Theresa May at the last election. We knew her as a no-nonsense sort of politician, someone to quietly and competently get on the job. Even so, her utter lack of spark on the campaign trail came as a shock. A glumbucket performance from Boris Johnson — or, yet worse, an actively nasty one — would be just as disastrous if not more so.

Unlike Theresa May in 2017 (who the public had never really ‘met’ before), we already know Boris Johnson — or, rather, we know what we like and don’t like about his public persona. Those who might vote for him expect to be entertained, perhaps uplifted, by him. A mean and bitter Boris would be an even bigger letdown than the Maybot was last time, with consequences to match.

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It is right, indeed essential, for the Prime Minister to stick by his promises. He must stand resolute in the face of what is thrown at him. But hitting back and lashing out does not reinforce his position. If he prevails, it will be through grace and good humour — and this must go not just for his own conduct, but that of the whole campaign: the manifesto, the party political broadcasts, the social media messaging, everything. It must inspire hope and optimism.

Brexit, whatever one thinks of it, is all the long hard slog that we need right now; so let the rest of the ‘offer’ be something the whole country can look forward to.

There are urgent questions demanding the ruling party’s attention–Brexit, housing, tuition fees, low productivity, the falling pound, and many more. The Prime Minister’s authority is threadbare. She may soon be sacked by her fellow Conservatives. But in Manchester, despite the expense, nothing will be settled.

The arguments for scrapping the whole expensive carnival, this season of late nights and heavy drinking, of freebies laid on by commercial lobbyists, and children accidentally conceived in hotel rooms when the Commons is dormant for three weeks, may seem strong. And yet something valuable would be lost to political life without it.

The annual conference of a governing party or potential party of government matters, for the insight it gives into the calibre of our would-be leaders. Sometimes, events in the apparent seclusion of a conference hall even reverberate outside.  

At Labour’s annual conference in 1993, John Smith set himself the seemingly impossible task of persuading trade unions to cast their block votes in favour of a motion depriving them of the use of their block votes in future leadership elections. He succeeded by a hair’s breadth. Had he failed, he would have resigned forthwith. His successor would not have been Tony Blair.

Conservative annual conference can also make or break careers, despite there being no votes cast. When Michael Howard resigned the leadership in May 2005, the received wisdom was that the next leader would be David Davis, or possibly Ken Clarke, until David Cameron’s speech to the October annual conference suddenly put him out in front.

This year, the media bristled with quotes from unnamed ministers goading Theresa May to sack her Foreign Secretary. She would not be the first. Michael Howard sacked him from the opposition front bench; David Cameron refused to include him in the Shadow Cabinet. Boris Johnson’s roller-coaster political career must surely have come off the rails long ago but for his unique ability to wow the annual conference.

There is no better opportunity for a leader to establish dominance over the mass of rivalries and factions that make up a political party. Early in her premiership, Margaret Thatcher was setting a record as the most unpopular prime minister in polling history. The economy was in chaos, and half her Cabinet was in more or less open revolt. Against that background, she told the 1980 Conservative conference–“You turn if you want to: the lady’s not for turning,” a phrase that told the assembled representatives exactly what sort of leader they were dealing with.

At the opposite extreme, there was Iain Duncan Smith’s address to the 2003 conference, which was supposed to end the crisis enveloping his leadership. “The quiet man is back–and he’s turning up the volume” was its most memorable phrase. Supporters were primed to interrupt him almost two dozen times with ecstatic applause, including a nine-minute standing ovation, yet the whole performance fell flat. Before the month was out, he had been ousted.

Conferences speeches can be mind-rottingly dull and content-free, but anyone who thinks they are all in that category might profit from looking at the address to this year’s Labour conference by the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Unequivocal promises to renationalise the water companies, railways, the grid, and Royal Mail, to take private finance iniative projects into public ownership, scrap tuition fees, and cut the deficit are all set out, in plain English. At a fringe, speaking to the like-minded, McDonnell went on to forecast that the election of a government led by Jeremy Corbyn might start a run on the pound.

There are performances that go down well in front of these self-selecting audiences, but suffer when they come up against political reality. I have not yet mentioned the conferences of the lesser parties, which matter greatly to their participants. It took the former Liberal leader David Steel many years to live down his instruction to his troops in 1981: “Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government!”

The head of Unite union, Len McCluskey, raised a wild cheer this year when he told the Labour delegates: “To those merchants of doom and whingers and whiners who say ‘We should have done better, we didn’t win’ I say this–We did win. We won the hearts and minds of millions…” We will see how that sounds when replayed in a few years.

Far be it from me to suggest that every memorable moment from a party conference reflects well on the politicians involved. The point is that they mattered. They would have mattered less in another context. Party conferences should not be ignored.