Tory conference could be poetic or painful

Will Boris make a dramatic intervention?

Autumn is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, according to both the poet Keats and a famous advert for Mr Kipling cakes.

It’s also party conference season.

There was mist in Brighton thanks to Labour last week, the Lib Dems were fairly mellow in Glasgow at their gathering and, with Boris Johnson winding up the rhetoric ahead of the Tory conference, things could get fruity in Manchester this week.

The Labour conference was the one most commentators picked out as potentially stormy. But after a grey start the sun shone, literally and figuratively, as Ed Miliband took control of the agenda and his party with his show-stealing pledge to freeze power prices for 20 months following any election win in 2015.

A couple of things are worth noting about his well-received keynote speech.

First, the unseen influence of Scots backbencher Tom Greatrex.

While others from the 2010 intake of MPs have raced to junior office or shadow cabinet, Greatrex has been beavering away in the shadow energy team.

He’s not only the architect of Labour’s energy policy now set to be the centrepiece of their electoral offer, he also provided Miliband with the Scottish section of his speech.

The Scottish heart patient treated in England to whom Miliband referred to make the point about the close ties of the union is one of Greatrex’s constituents in his Rutherglen and Hamilton seat.

It may be a thin field but Greatrex is emerging as the intellectual powerhouse of One Nation Labour. He’s one to watch in next week’s reshuffle.

Secondly, claims Miliband’s speech allowed viewers to get a feel for the person as well as the politician overlook the fact that normal people don’t watch party conference speeches.

On a Tuesday afternoon most people are either at work or uninterested.

It seems strange no one has suggested keynote speeches take place in the evening to garner a bigger TV audience.

Though anyone who has ever been at a conference of an evening would tell you what goes on would be familiar more to watchers of programmes that show police dealing with squalid Saturday night shenanigans than to Question Time viewers.

At least one senior Labour politician had to be almost literally carried up the stairs to bed in Brighton after being ambushed by some hard-drinking hacks.

But it’s the Tories who could face the political hangover from Labour’s libations.

They’re under pressure to produce a policy as stellar as Ed’s energy promise. Instead, there’s potential for fireworks from two familiar sources Europe and Boris.

Concerned that Miliband’s performance last week winnows the chances of a Tory victory in 2015 further, backbenchers desperate for a referendum on the EU are now manoeuvring to have it brought forward from the Prime Minister’s pledged date of 2017.

The maths are such that an alliance of Conservative and Labour backbenchers who want the same thing, if for different reasons, could get their way.

The question is whether there’s the political will to pursue a path that could destabilise either, or both, parties fatally.

Boris Johnson is a destabilising force with the political will to get to the top.

He’s been uncharacteristically quiet of late but on the eve of the Conservative conference he let it be known he’d like to return to Westminster from his current seat of power in London’s City Hall.

Now every Tory association in the land will be trying to persuade BoJo to stand for them. His speech on Tuesday is almost as keenly anticipated as the Prime Minister’s.

Cameron will be hoping the Keats poem that sums up the coming week will be To Hope.

With BoJo around it could be To One Who Has Been Long In City (Hall) Pent.