Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Hannah White.

The summer is nearly over. MPs are set to return to Westminster, but not for all that long because

in a week or so that some of them,

at least, will be packing their bags again. It's that time of year, yes, the party conference

countdown has begun. The Westminster Village is set to decamp to Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham,

Bournemouth and beyond, and get face to face with the party members, rub shoulders with the lobbyists,

stay up late with the journalists, and schmooze with the business delegates. Over successive weekends

in September and October, political parties will try to seize the momentum and shape the narrative.

But of course, it doesn't always work like that. So today, we're going to be taking another

trip into the inside briefing

vaults, digging out a fascinating episode that we recorded in 2022 in which we asked the

following question. Just what is the point of party conferences? Now that episode was presented

by my colleague, Alex Thomas, and he's here with me now in the studio. Hi, Alex. Are you looking forward to the latest party conference season? Hi, Hannah. Yeah, I am. I do look forward to these things. They're sort of festivals of politics. So yeah, something to look forward to after we come back from holidays. And I think when you recorded this podcast originally, you were a relative party conference newbie, but now you're a grizzled veterans. So how has your view of

conferences changed? Grisal, definitely. Yeah, I think I'd be, because of the COVID disruptions in

2020, which is when I joined the IFG, I think I'd only be into sort of one set of party conferences,

so I was still kind of learning the ropes. But I mean, I don't think, I don't think my views

have changed fundamentally, but I would say, and I think

it comes out in some of the things we're about to hear, the sort of the importance to them,

as the kind of recovering civil servant that I was, and to some extent still am, there was a tendency

to slightly kind of see them as an inconvenience, a disruption to the year, go off and sort of,

you know, have fun over there, but actually, as you expose more to journalists, different types of politicians, politicians

in different modes, you see how important it is to them, to activists, to shaping the momentum

...