Dilettante: I’m skipping party conference season

I got an email on Sunday afternoon, reminding me that I was invited to a shindig in Liverpool that very evening, organised by a public affairs outfit to mark the beginning of Labour party conference. I went to that party last year and actually had a very nice time; whoever had worked on the guestlist had done a good job. The drinks were free and pleasant and the crowd was interesting.

I could have gone again this year, but there was one slight issue. The invitation landed in my inbox at 13.48pm, at which point I was sitting on my sofa, eating fruit and playing a video game. By 10.30pm, the point at which I turned up to those drinks in 2024, I was… in bed, at home, watching a streamer play that same game I’d been struggling with earlier.

You see I am, for the first time in over a decade, not attending party conferences at all this year. It’s been an odd experience so far, staying in London while knowing what’s happening elsewhere. My WhatsApp groups have been taken over by logistical questions – who’s taking what train up? What parties are going on this evening? Anyone for a quick dinner in town? – and I’m reading them all but not partaking.

In some ways it is making me feel quite left out; there was a time when I loved nothing more than conferences. I’d even get mocked for it, by friends and strangers alike. So many of them would only go to the gatherings resentfully, but I adored them. They made me feel so alive. Maybe that was the problem: the higher the highs, the lower the lows.

Had I always treated conferences as events I resentfully had to attend, then perhaps I wouldn’t have grown to dislike them so much. I just don’t think that’s who I am, though. I either throw myself into things entirely or balk at the very idea of them.

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I used to love conferences because they made me feel like there was a bubble and, crucially, I was allowed inside it. I’d spend days and nights chatting away with other journalists and with MPs, peers, advisers, lobbyists and whoever else could wrangle an invite to the funnest events. It felt exhilarating, and a balm to the soul of someone who was so dreadfully unpopular at school. I learnt so much and met so many people and felt – no cheesy reference intended – like I was in the thick of it. How could I not have loved it?

In fact, I used to find it so intoxicating that I never stopped to think about the bigger picture: what those conferences did to SW1, and whether they should exist at all. This started changing in 2020, during the pandemic. Suddenly left without a tribe, I felt I had to rebuild my sense of self from the ground up, and in a way that didn’t rely on the gossip I knew, the bars I hung out in or the people I called my friends and contacts. That was the beginning of the end.

I still eagerly went to conferences once the lockdowns ended, but something was missing. I even wrote about it in this very magazine, quite early into my tenure as one of its columnists. Somehow, I could finally see this yawning gap between Westminster and the country, and it worried me that no-one seemed able or willing to try and fix it.

We were having a jolly old time in Liverpool, Birmingham, Brighton or Manchester but Britain’s problems just deepened and deepened, and it didn’t look like anyone was offering solutions that would actually work. Part of it probably stemmed from human nature: it’s hard to have a truly bad time if you’re stuck in a space with a lot of your friends and colleagues, and surrounded by endless free glasses of cheap plonk.

It’s also tough to try and look outside your bubble if you’re so firmly ensconced within it. Being at conference means becoming quite ragingly parochial – rubbernecking at intriguing conversations happening next to you, trying to see which MPs seem tellingly happy and which seem forlorn, seeking intel about what happened the night before at those parties you weren’t at.

Hell, even trying to care about policy won’t land you anywhere. I spent ten years attending fringe events and I can tell you: they’re all the same, year after year after year. It’s the same people talking about the same things, again and again and again. Nothing meaningful can be gained from them, aside from maybe a bad coffee and cheap pastry to wolf down while sitting in the audience.

In short: I really am not missing out by having decided to stay put in London. If anything, the distance I’ve created for myself probably will make me better at my job. It’s easier to see the bigger picture if you’ve taken a step back. Does a small part of me still wish she were there right now, hungover as a dog and despairing at the length of her to-do list? No comment, my friends, no comment…