Despite the naysayers, party conferences are not meaningless, so what can we expect from the Tories at Conservative Party Conference 2025? Eliot Wilson gives us the lay of the land

The Conservative Party’s annual conference began in Manchester yesterday. As usual, it is the last of the three – should we now start to think of four? – major parties to hold its annual gathering, rounding out the party conference season before Parliament returns next Monday. It has not been a vintage year so far, especially with Andy Burnham’s nascent leadership bid fizzling out at the Labour conference last week, so what can we expect from the Tories?

Party conferences are now intricately planned media events, but, unlike those of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the Tories’ annual meeting has never had a role in policy-making. Arthur Balfour, their languid, intellectually brilliant but detached leader from 1902 to 1911, said with feeling, “​​I would as soon be guided by the views of my valet as by the Conservative Party conference”.

But conferences are not meaningless: they offer the parties’ leading lights great opportunities and dangerous pitfalls in equal measure, and the simple act of gathering so many party members together in close quarters has a strange alchemical effect, producing a collective mood which can be measured.

Kemi Badenoch’s party has assembled in circumstances more grim and forbidding than it........

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