Hello and welcome to Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollust, and in this special live edition from Conservative Party Conference,

I'm delighted to say we have the Tory Party chairman, Greg Hans,

and the Conservative MP, Sorrow Breakcliffe, to discuss what the mood has been like in Manchester this week

and what the party is doing to gear up for next year's general election.

So, yeah, I'll start with you, Greg.

What have you kind of made of the mood so far? There's been lots of talk.

I've seen some talk in the media of it being a bit dead, a bit flat.

I think someone wrote that it was a ghost town here in Manchester. Is that what you've been making of it so far? No, I don't know who said that, Alan. Perhaps they arrived here

before the conference started. But I've been here since Saturday lunchtime, for the start of the

conference, Sunday lunchtime. Actually, the numbers speak for themselves. There's 13,000 people here,

the most at Conservative Party conference in more than a decade.

We've got more businesses here than any conference for a decade.

We've got the biggest fringe that the party has ever had at a Conservative Party conference.

So I think the numbers speak for themselves.

Huge number of people here, huge amount of interest, huge amount of enthusiasm.

And it's my first, it's my 23rd Conservative Party conference,

but my first as party chairman. And I've really enjoyed it. And I think it's a really, really

positive atmosphere, positive buzz around the room and around the whole area.

So you obviously, you and I spoke the last time it was here in 2021. It was your first conference in person as an MP.

How is it going to compare to then?

Obviously, we'll not talk about last year.

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