Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you very much for tuning in wherever you are around the globe.

And some of you, no doubt, perhaps still in Liverpool.

And of course, our focus in this podcast is on the Labour conference.

Conferences are increasingly strange and hard to make sense of.

And of course, our role in the rock and roll politics podcast and cooperative is to make

sense of everything, however nonsensical it becomes. The reason being is that even at times when

party conferences had a kind of wild quality, you could make sense of them. So labor in the late

70s, early 80s, the party conferences were angry, insurrectionary places

where in the late 70s you could have cabinet ministers being heckled, including the Chancellor

Dennis Healy. You could have Tony Benn, a fellow cabinet minister being hailed and cheered to the rafters and you could have

motions where the government is being defeated or the leadership defeated, highly charged

and significant gatherings. But, you know, the outline, as I outlined, it was clear at the time.

And similarly with Tory conferences, although always less formally powerful than Labour conferences used to be,

you could measure the mood with absolute clarity.

I remember, for example, the Tory conference in 1990. I think it was in Brighton.

No, sorry, 1992, the first conference after John Major's triumphant election victory, and it really was a triumph to win the fourth time in a row, and he

did it with a very large proportion of the vote. But then Britain had fallen out of the

exchange rate mechanism, and the Maastricht Treaty and the debates about them were raging.

And that Tory conference was utterly unruly similar to a Labour conference in the early

1980s or late 1970s. And I remember sitting next to another BBC political correspondent. I was a

political correspondent for the BBC at the time

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