The Revolution Will Be Half-Empty
CPAC-GB is here to save us! But who from?
“Great Britain — the country I once led,” Liz Truss declared to the Conservative Political Action Conference in London. And to give the attendees credit, no one laughed.
Truss was addressing a half-empty room in a hotel in Greenwich. The audience could have come to hear about time-shares, or how to get rich from crypto, or the secrets that doctors don’t want you to know, but as it turned out they had come to Save The West. The slogan was everywhere. Most of the speakers were slightly elliptical about who we were Saving the West from, although we could pretty much guess.
CPAC, as it’s always known, is a big deal in the US, where it fills a void that, improbably, turns out to exist if you don’t have annual party conferences. It’s far from clear whether there’s a market for it in the UK. What there definitely are is tickets. If you fancy hearing from Andrea Jenkyns or Nile Gardiner or a host of names that mean nothing to me at all, you can still get tickets for Friday and Saturday at £100 a pop. I promise you there’ll be a seat.