Conference diary, day two part one.

 The second day of conference began for me with an early start: I had to get myself up at 6.30 am or so to come into Central Manchester for a 7.30am prayer breakfast organised by the Conservative Christian Fellowship with Open Doors, the body which monitors persecution of Christians around the world.

It was a very good and extremely powerful session, with good contributions from several speakers but in particular the Bishop of Truro and Bishop-Designate of Winchester, who Jeremy Hunt when Foreign Secretary had commissioned to lead a team to prepare what became known as the "Truro report" into the persecution worldwide of religious minorities and what Britain should do about it.

As so often, there is a massive disconnect between the conference as perceived by most of the delegates attending it and as written about by the press.

No doubt the members attending, often referred to disparagingly as the "party faithful," tend to think things are going better for their party than may actually be the case, though I suspect they often have a better idea for what is really going on than people who use expressions like that one may realise. And I also suspect that the ladies and gentlemen of the press are inclined to suffer from a degree of "confirmation bias." E.g. that they arrive at the conference with expectations of what the mood is going to be and tend to notice the evidence which supports that narrative - which usually isn't the whole story. One usually astute journalist said that he had never seen a party conference like this one, which he described as the "Night of the living dead." Must confess that's not my impression.

Though of course, confidence is no guarantee of success. Perhaps the worst political forecast in recent British political history, and the most extreme exemplar of hubristic overconfidence, was written from a party conference. This was Sion Simon's New Statesman article, "We cannot be killed" (newstatesman.com), written at the 2007 Labour conference. 

The one thing this article got right was the first seven words of the piece, "Let’s be clear: this is a mad one." and it predicted "Shortly there will be an election, in which Labour will increase its majority." The next election was, in fact, three years later, and Labour suffered one of its' worst ever defeats.

Speeches in the main conference hall today were kicked off by the energy secretary, who announced the six companies which have been shortlisted to build Small Modular Reactors in the UK, with the final decision to be announced in the spring of next year.

I believe new nuclear build should be an essential part of a balanced low-carbon energy strategy, so I would really like to see this move forward. Other speeches this morning came from the Transport secretary, Mark Harper, and from the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, Lucy Frazer.

For me the standout speech of the day was the first speech of the afternoon, which came from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt. This was important enough that I want to give it a post of its', own, including a link which can be used to watch it, so I will stop this post here, and follow on with a further post about the Chancellor's contribution.