‘Welcome to the rohypnol conference’

When David Cameron first wandered out of a knitwear catalogue to become Tory leader, he introduced himself as the heir to Blair. But now he’s got settled in, and the sexiest politician in the world turns out to be Stateside, he seems to be gunning to be the white Barack. Obama turned America blue with the promise of ‘change’, so Dave spent last week’s Conservative Party conference pledging to do the same here. It’s all going to be so very clean and shiny under the Tories – change you can believe in, beliefs you can change in, yes we can, no we can’t (tolerate Labour) – all brought to you by Bono (1).

Of course, Bono was letting his bleeding heart spatter Gordon Brown’s shirt sleeves not so very long ago – so that doesn’t seem very different. And, the big story of conference, Cameron’s decision to invite General Sir Richard Dannatt to be his ‘military adviser’, seems uncannily like a continuation of Gordon Brown’s political gift of GOATs (a Government of All the Talents) – a scheme which hasn’t met with much success. Of the four non-politicians Brown brought into government when he entered No10, only one now remains (2). ‘This sounded like a political gimmick’, raged shadow home secretary Chris Grayling in the immediate aftermath of the Dannatt announcement – seemingly under the impression that the general was the latest happy camper in Brown’s big tent rather the new boy in the Tory team.

On arrival in Manchester, the first news that greeted me (gossip grubber for the Evening Standard) was the news that there was to be no news. A good conference was to be a dull conference and a great conference would be ‘transcendentally boring’ (3). So Chris Grayling making an on-air blooper was a rare malfunction in the march of the digitally re-mastered Tory army towards almost certain election victory. The viewer at home might be unsure as to why he’d want to vote for them, but would more likely change the channel, won over to the idea that it all looks very, very dull indeed.

So it was fortunate, on the ground, that party chairman Eric Pickles decided to claim publicly that the Tories should appear ‘humble’ and forgo champagne throughout – for it allowed for four days of fun pointing at Bolly-offenders. Shadow prisons minister, Alan Duncan, already in the stocks for complaining that MPs are being forced to live on ‘rations’, was busted – shock horror! – swigging the good stuff at the New Statesman party, as was David Willetts. The evening after – shlock horror! – David Cameron with champagne was papped by a photographer who, I hear, had to leave the party with the camera stuffed down his underpants.

A Mirror reporter then went above and beyond the call of duty, dressing up as a waiter and trying to drift into shot behind shadow chancellor George Osborne as he was giving a breakfast-time interview, carrying two flutes of champagne on a tray. Special Branch gave the reporter the once over (4). A Tory party worker was arrested after trying to steal a £150 bottle of fizz in the secure zone (5) while the bar at the Midland Hotel, from which the bottle went walkies, was a hive of champagne swigging. Some gave Pickles a nod by attempting to hide the bottles when photographers came snooping. Others broke the spirit if not the letter of the law by switching to Prosecco. On the train back to London, there were quite a few delegates so hungover from their champers they didn’t even stick around for Dave’s big speech. And who could blame them?

Veteran right-wing columnist Peter Hitchens probably didn’t hang around either. At a ‘dissident’ fringe meeting of the Bruges Group, speaking alongside the Daily Telegraph‘s arch new-Tory hater, Simon Heffer, and former MP Barry Legg, the trio railed against much the same thing that Mick Hume has, less histrionically, pointed out on spiked: that the new breed of robo-MP has little to no grassroots support (6).

Legg pointed out that fewer people had voted for the nice young wonk, Chloe Smith, in the Norwich North by-election earlier this year than had voted for the 2005 Tory candidate when the party was (in Theresa May’s words) still ‘nasty’ under Michael Howard. Heffer did some crowd-pleasing non-rivers of blood Enoch Powell quotes.

But most perplexed was Hitchens. ‘Ladies and gentleman’, he began. ‘Comrades! As I believe the Conservative Party now addresses you… This is a dissident meeting – an insurgent meeting if I have anything to do with it… Boris Johnson was invited for a drink by David Cameron last night to discuss their differences over Europe. Dave put rohypnol in Boris’ champagne. He intends to put rohypnol in all your champagne. This is the rohypnol conference! You’re all being systematically date-raped into the delusion that there is anything conservative about this Conservative Party.’ He then went on to urge everyone in the room not to vote at all in the next General Election. ‘I am going to have lunch in France. Just do the gardening. Clean behind the fridge. Anything other than voting for the Conservative Party.’

I’m no fan of Hitchens and his pent-up angst on the subject, but it’s hard to disagree that there’s something disconcerting about this new Toryland, a political landscape that is largely featureless and where all anyone’s really scared about is frightening the horses, wherever they might be… Rather than inspiring the party faithful or actually pushing forward any compelling reason to vote for them, the Conservative Party conference was all about who was drinking what and whether a wild-eyed Michael Crick would yet be able to trip Kenneth Clarke into saying anything remotely interesting on the matter of the Lisbon Treaty.

Meanwhile, on the podium, giant sums of government debt were fiddled about with to polite applause, as Britain braces itself to stop being a nation of shopkeepers to emerge as a nation of bankrupt shopkeepers governed by accountants. Even the delegates in the hall seemed oddly unenthused and disconnected – really keen to talk about Europe, if only anyone would let them, and utterly baffled by the notion of ‘progressive Conservatism’. As another fringe speaker, Peter Oborne, pointed out, that’s an oxymoron.

Rather, Manchester seemed like a practical example of Brendan O’Neill’s textbook suggestion that we are heading into an era in which ‘political parties will be finally emptied of both politics and anything that smells like party spirit’ (7).

Jane Austen meets Sex and the City

Very brave of the Beeb, a mere three weeks after the Roman Polanski hoo-ha, to screen a sex comedy on Sunday nights in which Sick Boy from Trainspotting plays a rich, ramrod, old suitor, who fell in love with the heroine when she was a mere 13 years old.

Not. (As a character in Wayne’s World would say.)

For the BBC’s latest romp turns out to be yet another Jane Austen adaptation: Emma, this time remade as a three-episode version of Sex and the City – plus corsets, minus the Mac and Manhattan. ‘You must look demure but at the same time alluring’, trills Miss Emma Woodhouse to her clueless girlfriend, Harriet, who’s trying to hook up with the local vicar. Pass the Prada bonnet and get thee to a ballroom, this is absolutely nothing to do with Jane Austen and everything to do with bad dialogue and hammy flashbacks involving Jane Fairfax almost falling off a cliff.

Everyone who’s going to watch the programme will know the plot already (spoilt heiress gets married to her sister’s brother-in-law, with assorted japes and gypsies in between), so why another spin around of the Austen whirligig? Doesn’t the old girl deserve a rest?

Scriptwriter Andrew Davies has a lot to answer for – his decision to have Darcy jump into a pond and come across Elizabeth in sopping britches in the 1996 bonkbuster version of Pride and Prejudice (near perfect in every other sense) seems to have spawned the idea that Jane Austen is really all about what period fashions might look like damp. Since then we’ve had another Pride and Prejudice adaptation, for the big screen, in which Keira Knightley falls in love with a Darcy so un-Darcy he somehow drifted out of Pemberly straight onto windswept moors in order to come back as a dripping wet Heathcliff (pre-Cliff Richard). Shortly after there was a BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility in which pent-up, wannabe reverend Edward Ferrars strips off to chop wood in a sudden downpour.

In Emma – here we go again – our Humbert Humbert hero Mr Knightley (aka Sick Boy: actor Johnny Lee Miller) has awfully nice trousers, and is very passionate, in a most un-Knightley, un-Austenian way. ‘You’re always out and about when I’m around’, he sighs to his nymphet, now all grown up with ringlets. ‘Mr Elton and I are simply very good friends and nothing more’, huffs Emma. (Although, mercy-be, in terms of wet clothes Knightley has only capered about with a few snowballs so far, moistening his gloves slightly.)

The tension of the series comes not from the characters being marooned in stuffy Regency England, but from the bizarre twenty-first-century dating psychobabble. At some point, whoever created this very pretty 9pm drama seems to have thrown the actual novel aside and adapted the work with exclusive reference to other Jane Austen adaptations and what they think middle-aged women want to down with for their end-of-Sabbath Chardonnay. Even the actors seem to be stuck in synthetic Austen-land. The actor who plays Mr Eliot, for instance, is the spitting image of the man who played Wickham in Davies’ P&P but turns out to be (IMDB informs me) Tom, the errant elder brother of Edmund Bertram, the hero of Mansfield Park who, uncannily enough, was also played by Sick Boy (aka Mr Knightley in this version of Emma).

The point of a Jane Austen novel is not the riveting plot, nor the unbearable tweeness that this version seems to thrive on. It’s the barbed wit of the language that means Austen’s work is picked up again and again. Martin Amis had it right when he noted that in his 1996 version of P&P Andrew Davies had been ‘shrewd enough to regard his function as one of artistic midwifery – to get the thing out of the page and on to the screen in as undamaged a state as possible’. Aldous Huxley’s 1940 version, Amis added, was ‘cold proof that any tampering will reduce the original to emollient inconsequentiality’.

And so here we are again back at Emma. Clueless, an updated comedy version starring Alicia Silverstone, was better than this, at least bothering to take the book down off the bookshelf. What I want to know is, why can’t the BBC start adapting something that might be new to someone, somewhere if they really have to do a big period drama every six months? Top of my list for stuff screaming to get off the shelves is a really dank and dirty version of Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton (Slays Two, Found Gassed, Thinks of Cat), Dostoevsky’s Devils (sex, death and revolution), or something really ambitious, like Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

How the Conservatives lost their fizz

The Bible has 10 commandments, Conservative party chairman Eric Pickles has one: Thou shalt not quaff champers.

Pickles’s Law was hastily chipped in stone to make the Tories look “humble” in recession-ised Britain. There were to be no pictures of ex-Bullingdon boys knocking back the Bolly. So Pickles will not be best pleased with all the party activists caught swigging the good plonk on the eve of George Osborne’s austerity speech. And would have been horrified at the commotion at the Spectator party last night when an enterprising photographer, who was banned from the event, snapped Tory leader David Cameron nursing a champagne flute.

Shadow prisons minister Alan Duncan, who is still not out of the stocks after complaining that parliamentarians were being forced to live on “rations”, was busted, mid-guzzle, along with shadow universities minister David Willetts, at the New Statesman party the night before. So when I saw him at the Spectator shindig he railed against the viciousness of those printing pictures showing him drinking the forbidden grape-juice, before proceeding to point and chant “naughty girl, naughty girl!” at me as I walked past him.

Tory high command are extremely anxious not to frighten the voters. A good conference is a dull conference. Gossip-wise it should be, if possible, transcendentally boring. But Champagnegate is a scandal entirely of the party’s own making. At the Labour party conference last week cabinet ministers turned out to the News International party and drank Murdoch’s fizz without fear. You could argue they needed it, after the defection of the Sun – as Napoleon said, “In defeat I need it”. But you’d have to be a very committed teetotaller to resist a free glass on a silver tray after a hard day’s conferencing.

In part, the champagne ban serves another purpose than attempting to make the Tories look humbler. The order was first drafted last year when the full impact of the recession hit home just before the Tory party conference began but it must have been helped along by the disastrous booze-fuelled leaks at the Labour conference the week before. This year it’s not just a case of put down the Pol Roger, it’s a case of stay as sober as possible and avoid any slips.

Yet post-election, should the country turn blue, don’t expect the ban to last. The champagne socialists will surely only be replaced by champagne socialites. As Joseph Dargent, a famous wine merchant, once claimed: “No government could survive without champagne. Champagne in the throats of our diplomatic people is like oil in the wheels of an engine.”