Hot on the heels of the bustling but surprisingly downbeat Labour Conference in Liverpool last week, the Barndoor Strategy team headed to Birmingham to see how the Conservative Party was picking itself up from its electoral mauling back in July.

Conservative Conference 2024 was a bit of a paradox.  Given the party was soundly drummed out of office and suffered its worst defeat since the 19^th century you might have been forgiven for thinking that the event would be a bit of a wake.  However, the opposite was true. The only outward sign that the party was not in government was that the usual leaders’ speech was replaced with that of candidates, and the footfall was rather lower than could usually be expected.

Other than that, you still saw eerie vignettes of government – Shadow Ministers surrounded by gaggles of sycophantic staffers, “big beasts” making keynote speeches.  Perhaps in the greatest irony, it was one of the key architects of the party’s current predicament who made the call.  “You don’t realise how bad it is,” said Liz Truss.  For once, she isn’t wrong.  The challenge facing the conservative party in getting back into office, boxed in as it finds itself between Reform and the Lib Dems, is as formidable as Labour’s vast majority.  It will take a leader with considerable guile coupled with the deftness of touch of a bomb disposal engineer to navigate the trap the party finds itself in.

The venue for the Conservative Conference this year was the now familiar M.C Escher-inspired nightmare that is the ICC in Birmingham. Even though every event seemed to be in a new room that definitely wasn’t down this corridor or up this staircase the last time we looked, there is no denying that numbers were well down on the same event last year in Manchester.

But while the Labour Conference was largely full of commercial visitors desperately trying to mix with Cabinet ministers (usually unsuccessfully), this year’s Conservative Conference was definitely one mostly for the members.

The ongoing party leadership campaign was the focus of most people with each of the four candidates appearing at a seemingly endless stream of ‘Conversation with…’ style events while their supporters handing out astonishing quantities of branded tat to willing party members.

All this activity culminated in each candidate delivering a keynote speech on the final day of the conference. It was generally agreed that it was James Cleverly, perhaps the underdog, who came out of the week best while the two more right-wing candidates, Robert Jenrick, whose speech underwhelmed, and Kemi Badenoch, who made a couple of notable media blunders, fared less well.

A week from now, these four candidates will have been whittled down to two by MPs and the Conservative Party membership will finally have their say. And come November, we might finally see the Tories forming some sort of functional opposition once more.

Away from the leadership contest, while the bars were packed with former MPs still licking their wounds, there was still a fairly vibrant fringe programme. While the media focused on one-off appearances from the likes of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak and the many ‘What went wrong…’ focused discussions, there was still some focus on the policy areas where the Conservative Party needs to focus.

Former Ministers can be surprisingly loose-lipped now that they have been liberated from the chains of office.  Moreover, given that the ship of state often sails on their observations, it yields an unexpected light on the challenges still faced by the present generation.  The faces and the ministers may have changed; however, the problems affecting the UK remain the same, as does much about the direction of Government policy.

We will have to wait and see for Labour to cast its new narrative and concomitantly the Conservatives to work out what it is they are about in opposition and to come up with some new ideas in terms of policy.  That process began this conference season but it has a long way to go.