Funny by gaslight with the 24-hour Tory Party people

Our HE editor gets out his sketchpad at the Conservative Party conference

The autumn political conference season comes after the round of summer music festivals. This week, the Conservatives gathered in Manchester with Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Dominic Raab and Priti Patel in tow, making them the least appealing band in Manchester since A Certain Ratio.

At the heart of this Madchester circus was Boris Johnson, at his first conference as party leader and prime minister. He should have been the impresario Tony Wilson to Dominic Cummings’s mad-genius Martin Hannett. Rather, as he spent the week buffeted by allegations of inappropriate behaviour and Brexit turmoil, the blonde-haired Johnson looked more like Tim Burgess, lead singer of The Charlatans, caught in the headlights of one of Manchester’s yellow trams.

Emerging on stage for his leader’s speech, Johnson was accompanied by the sounds of The Who’s Baba O’Riley. It opens with the lines “I’m here in the fields, I fight for my meals”, which is hardly a compelling vision of our post-Brexit future (although one presumes these are no longer fields of wheat, despite how useful a domestic supply of grain might become).

Obviously, nobody in Johnson’s team has ever watched Robot Chicken Star Wars, where the song is used as the soundtrack to Emperor Palpatine’s death fall just before his empire collapses. The 1971 track might have been intended to point to a time before Britain’s membership of the European Union. Its original working title, Teenage Wasteland, more accurately describes the government’s inertial policy on tuition fees.

There was much to enjoy at this conference for the higher education connoisseur. Our kid Chris Skidmore, the universities minister, was in town on Monday as he was temporarily released from an un-prorogued Westminster.

Skidmore has the look of someone permanently high on life, or at least still pinching himself that he is back in his “dream job” as science and universities minister following the resignation of the prime minister’s brother Jo Johnson—the Ian Curtis of the 24-hour Tory Party people.

If Skidmore were part of the Manchester music scene, he would be Badly Drawn Boy: popular with those who listen to him but yet to stretch himself with anything more demanding than imitative versions of his predecessors’ work.

When Skidmore turned up, he found the time to tell everyone that research funding in the UK was “highly inadequate” and should be overhauled. In an event organised by the UK’s learned societies, he went a long way to confirming that the industrial strategy as we have known it is to be confined to the filing cabinet of history.

He seemed to be having far too much fun for a university minister let out of London for the day without his civil service handlers. It was like when Shaun Ryder was sent to Barbados to record an album but spent all the money on sherbet.

We are in no way suggesting that Skidmore was the target of Boris Johnson’s conference hall attack on "the cocaine habits of the bourgeoisie”. The prime minister was obviously talking about Michael Gove. But the “hello sky, hello trees” universities minister certainly seems in a state of euphoria these days.

He always has the air of a man just happy to be here. Accordingly, it does not seem to be part of his job description as universities minister to tell us specifically what the government plans to do about the recommendations of the Augar report, or how universities will survive the Brexit cliff-edge.

Skidmore told a fringe panel that the government would respond to the Augar review before Christmas, which is an advance on “before the end of winter” as promised by education secretary Gavin Williamson at the Universities UK conference in Birmingham. As Roz from Disney-Pixar’s Monsters, Inc would say, their silence is very reassuring.

Back in the main hall of Manchester Central, Johnson was doing his best to gaslight the entire country. “It cannot be stressed too much that this is not an anti-European party and it is not an anti-European country. We love Europe,” he declared to wild applause from the swivel-eyed no-deal Brexiteers who had queued round the block in the rain to hear him explain how we would leave the EU, do or die.

The same conference-goers who the night before at the Democratic Unionist Party drinks reception had been shouting “No surrender” as Johnson took to the stage with Arlene Foster and Nigel Dodds—the Morrissey and Gary Barlow of this Conservative haçienda.

Rumours have been circulating for some time that Cummings was pushing for an “eye-watering” announcement on the science budget at this party conference. As welcome as an uplift in research funding would be, does UK science really want to find itself as a pet project for Cummings—like a New Order concept album?

We waited in the hall during the leader’s speech for the big announcement on science, but it was not forthcoming. Maybe it was missed out in Johnson’s ad libs about launching Jeremy Corbyn into space as a “communist cosmonaut”.

Johnson did praise British nuclear fusion research. Apparently, we “are on the verge of creating commercially viable miniature fusion reactors for sale around the world, delivering virtually unlimited zero-carbon power”.

Johnson added: “Now I know they have been on the verge for some time, it is a pretty spacious kind of verge, but now we are on the verge of the verge.” The Joint European Torus fusion facility is certainly on the verge. Following the government’s notification to leave Euratom after Brexit, the EU and the UK Atomic Energy Authority committed to a €100-million package to keep the lights on only until 2020.

It is not clear what verge Johnson is talking about—it’s more like an enormous plain that stretches as far as the eye can see. The Iter fusion plant in southern France, of which the UK is a partner, does not plan to achieve first plasma until 2025 and full fusion power until 2035—the commercialisation of nuclear fusion is a long, long way off, like an Oasis reunion.

Instead of a pledge on the science budget, we got an after-dinner speech about how education, infrastructure and technology would be the drivers of productivity in a post-Brexit economy, which would be, somehow, “one-nation Tory” and tax-cutting and Thatcherite.

He wandered on to the topic of buses. All politicians now seem obsessed with buses as the connective glue of the nation.

The ex-mayor of London is very pro buses. He said that they defined “the liveability of your town or your village and your ability to stay there and start a family there”, which is a claim that not even the National Express would make.

Johnson, standing on a plinth in the old Manchester Central train station, pronounced that London was “the greatest city in the world” and claimed Birmingham as the centre of the industrial revolution. Manchester is the home of the steam age, the atomic age and the computer age, and is the birthplace of both graphene and the Pankhurst sisters. Mancunians certainly think it could make a claim on the title of greatest city.

Unfortunately, it also gave us Mick Hucknall and boy bands, and perhaps the ignominy of Johnson’s first and only address to the Conservative Party conference as prime minister. As the press corps departed on trains back to London, they could look forward to a return soon as part of the now inevitable election campaign.