If you're crappy and you know it...

"You've been a very naughty boy! I'll make you scream for mercy! That'll be a hundred quid, darling, cash if you don't mind." That was the message from the [Tory] chairman, Francis Maude. He told them the British people thought they were crap. They believed that individual Tories were crap, that their policies were crap, and their outlook was crap.

Of course he didn't use those exact words. Instead he used charts. Nobody thinks the Tories shared their values. More than half the population thinks they're stuck in the past, that they don't care about ordinary people. He illustrated his talk with what could hardly be called a PowerPoint presentation; more an impotence slide show.

He had met a single mother during the campaign and she had told him that the Tories disapproved of people like her. "Too often, we sound like people who think the only good mother is a married mother!" It was time, he didn't quite say, for Tories to fan out around Blackpool, find single mothers, and give them each a big old hug. Or a packet of Smarties.

The party not only had no right to be in power; it had no right even to survive. Because it was crap!

The platform rose as one at the end of his speech, but only a quarter of the hall followed their example, mostly the younger people, such as there are here. Many of the older delegates don't stand up because they're worried they won't be able to sit down again.

Malcolm Rifkind was the first of the leadership candidates up. His message, familiar after only one afternoon, was also "we are crap", though expressed more mildly, and alongside subtle hints about his own abilities and experience. "I have known Gordon Brown for a very long time: he is a big beast and a very tough man!" Only he, he implied, could tame this mangy but ferocious lion.

A rightwing Tory MP turned to me and said: "The problem with Malcolm is that he looks like a cross between Miss Jean Brodie and Charles Hawtrey."

As for Tony Blair, Mr Rifkind continued, "he can persuade most people of most things, and himself of almost anything. He is Bill Clinton without the sex - so far as we know!"

The conference roared with delight. After being told they were crap, they were glad to hear that the Labour leaders were crap too.

- Simon Hoggart on the 2005 Tory conference in Blackpool, Guardian, 4 October 2005