"Why does anyone give up a week's paid holiday to go to a Party Conference?"
They don't.
Most of the people there are paid to be there: MPs, researchers, journalists, think tank apparatchiki, that sort of thing. It is no coincidence that these jamborees are held outside the terms of at least the older universities: any really young-looking face belongs to a bag-carrying undergraduate who is prepared to work for little or nothing in order to get noticed by those who now appoint almost all MPs as if they were conferring earldoms.
And most of the rest are retired, because, beyond such circles, almost all members of political parties are now retired. Many of them, indeed, also have a pecuniary interest, being either in receipt of councillors' allowances or closely related (usually married) to those who are.
Will Milly be permitted to address the Labour Party Conference? Apparently so. Gordon Brown must be going soft in his old age. Mind you, Milly is not permitted to address Cabinet, and has not been so since being made Foreign Secretary. A Minister of State with vast foreign policy experience also comes along, and I think we all know who does the talking.
But that Minister cannot address the Labour Party Conference.
Because he is not a member of the Labour Party.
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"Mind you, Milly is not permitted to address Cabinet, and has not been so since being made Foreign Secretary"
ReplyDeleteI suspect you won't answer this directly, and revert to some variant of the tired "Come On! Everyone knows that etc etc", but how do you know this, and do you have any evidence? It sounds very unlikely.
If I told you that I have been in Cabinet meetings, acting as a notetaker, where the Foreign Secretary has updated the Cabinet on the situation in South Ossetia, what would you say? Because I have.
ReplyDelete