Their Party?

Just as the admittedly farcical proceedings of the last two and half days have been no worse than the MP-shedding of Reform UK, or the entire sorry history of Change UK, so even the switching off of microphones and the occasional removal of troublemakers were as nothing compared to Tony Blair's forcible ejection of Walter Wolfgang from the Labour Party Conference in 2005, never mind Keir Starmer's deployment of armed police at the end of every row in 2021.

It may not be the 18 per cent, ahead of Labour, that it managed on the day that it was first announced, but Your Party is still showing at 12 per cent tonight, one in eight. And after a hypothetical party led by Rupert Lowe started on 10 per cent yesterday, today brings the news that 43 per cent of Reform supporters would vote for it. Jeremy Corbyn has trouble with Marxist-Leninists, but Lowe has very little disagreement Yaxley-Lennonists. Corbyn had a bust-up with Zarah Sultana, but Lowe would have a love-in with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

The same may not be true of all attendees. While the Far Left groupuscules all hate each other, this weekend they managed to hold together against MPs who had already been elected without the Labour ticket and against the Labour machine. But the Far Right groupuscules routinely greet each other with the extreme physical violence fundamental to their ideology; let no one tell you that "Fascism" was almost a meaningless word. Around rather than against a sitting MP, the founding conference of Their Party would be like nothing that this country had ever seen. Lowe might ask Starmer, who was still in Opposition in 2021, how to go about hiring those armed police.