Humiliation upon humiliation for the Melster in front of half-full Tory crowd | John Crace

The unbearable lightness of the Tory party conference. A place where nothing ever happens. Where dreams come to die. Where the only joy to be found is in the possibility of forgetting. Oblivion is the hottest ticket on offer. Above all else, a microverse of infinite sadness and suffering.

The banners around the conference compound carry the catchy slogan “Stronger economy. Stronger borders”. They should say “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. A colleague asked the guard whether this was the media entrance. He replied: “It’s anyone’s. It’s so quiet in there. I’ve been to busier dinner parties.” You can’t help feeling that the security is there to stop people leaving, rather than keeping the unwanted out.

Inside the complex there is almost nothing going on. The exhibitors’ hall a ghost town. All the Tories have to offer is some Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher tat. It’s like entering a time warp. Ask if there’s any Kemi Badenoch merchandise and you get a shrug of the head. “Nah, mate. We’ve left that back at the warehouse. This is the only stuff that sells.”

All around there is just bewilderment. No one seems quite sure exactly why they have come. Mostly out of habit or because they are in the shadow cabinet and are rather obliged to make an appearance. Either way, it’s four days of misery for everyone concerned. They are all counting down the minutes till they can leave.

The stench of decay is overpowering. An event dedicated to “young voters – under 50”. Nothing that happens here really matters. During a fringe Spectator event, everyone was so bored that the interviewer asked Robert Jenrick if he would fight a horse-sized duck. It was by far the most interesting point of the day.

No one embodies this sense of existential melancholy more than Mel Stride. A man who has been through so many political iterations that he had long since forgotten what he actually believes. If anything. Mel is a natural-born follower. Someone who puts loyalty to the party above all else.

The Melster can be relied on to say whatever he is told to say. Even when he suspects it’s all nonsense. There was something heartbreaking about him having been the last man standing to defend Rishi Sunak during last year’s election campaign. No embarrassment is ever too much for Mel. He treads a fine line between decency and halfwittedness. And is all too often found on the wrong side.

These days Mel is to be found as shadow chancellor. Not because he has any deep grounding in economics but because the Tories don’t really have anyone else. He is the natural heir to the air-headed Jeremy Hunt. And not in a good way.

But these days Kemi has to take what she can get, so the Melster was first up in the main hall on Monday morning. The audience had clearly come pre-warned as there barely was one. The seating capacity is already far smaller than in previous years and the room was barely half full. It was like a fringe event for friends and family. He had to beg people to stay.

But let’s be generous. Even if Mel had a decent story to tell, he’d have struggled to keep what passed for an audience awake. Put simply, he is no public speaker. All the emphases come in the wrong place. It’s like he’s talking in a third or fourth language that he doesn’t properly understand.

At one point he even felt the need to explain a joke as no one had laughed. No one had the heart to tell him that the silence was because it wasn’t funny. The Melster looked crestfallen. He had chuckled himself to sleep with that one-liner the night before.

That was just one of Mel’s tragedies. Humiliation heaped on humiliation. What made his speech an act of desperation was that it was both intellectually dishonest and completely irrelevant. “We need hope,” he said. “We need a plan.” Unfortunately, Mel was offering neither. Least of all an explanation for the way successive Tory governments of which he had been part had left the country in such a desperate state. He seemed to think Labour had been given a wondrous economic inheritance. About as far from reality as you can get.

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Mel ploughed on. A quick bit of backstory that he seemed to think made him more interesting. It didn’t. Then a whole load of promises. Keeping the two-child benefit cap. Because why would you want to do the one thing that would make most difference to reducing child poverty? Cutting a whole load of benefits – though obviously not to pensioners. Got to protect the last remaining Tory core vote. He ignored the irony that he was proposing cutting the benefits that he had increased in one year as work and pensions secretary.

By now the Melster was desperate. He was promising all these things and no one was clapping. Because none of this was going to happen. Mel could have promised anything. Made any numbers up. It was just words to fill dead air. The audience was only here because they had nowhere better to be. This was just a meta conference. A conference that only existed because someone had thought there needed to be a conference. His closing words came out as a shout. As if volume made them more real. “We can. We will,” he said. He can’t. He won’t.

You’d have thought we’d just hit rock bottom after that. But then you probably hadn’t banked on Claire Coutinho being up next. Complete with slideshow that she hadn’t mastered. Quite how she has come to be shadow energy secretary is a mystery. Maybe she knows even less about other things than she does energy. Or maybe her role is just to make the Melster feel better about himself.

Claire’s big suggestion that also isn’t going to happen is to get rid of the Climate Change Act, install air conditioning in every building and dent investor confidence in the energy market. Brilliant. You can’t buy Claire’s level of stupidity.

The morning ended with a desultory debate on the Online Safety Act in which no one was much interested. As if there was a prize for the last person left awake. Toby Young argued that the act needed to be abolished. Far better that teenagers watched unlimited porn so long as rightwing activists had a platform to say whatever they liked. Julia Lopez excitedly announced the meaningless results of the online audience poll. Toby had won by 12 votes to eight. In current Tory circles, that counts as a landslide.