UK Conservatives Face Up to Opposition Reality After Quiet Business Day

(Bloomberg) — Britain’s Conservatives have struggled to fill out the corporate day event at their annual conference this year, in stark contrast to their self-branding as the UK’s party of business. 

Attendees in the room on Monday at the Birmingham convention’s Business Day described a sparsely attended fixture, with only around 100 guests sitting in on the morning panels. While more were expected to arrive for the evening dinner, it was a stark contrast to the 500-plus who attended the Labour conference business day a week earlier.

The depleted attendance is a marker of the Tories’ decline in the eyes of British business after they crashed to their worst ever defeat in the July 4 election. After returning just 121 Members of Parliament out of 650, there’s little prospect the party that had been in power for 14 years will have any significant influence over policy-making for the foreseeable future. 

Two business attendees said they were allowed in for free, suggesting the Tories were trying to pad out the numbers. A Conservative official involved in the organizing of the event denied the Tories had been giving away free tickets, while a party spokesman said there had been “significant interest” in the gathering, “with high demand for tickets and partnerships and a full exhibition hall.”

Tickets for business day had been on sale for £3,500 ($4,700) — more than the £3,000 price of entry to Labour’s event last week, which sold out within 24 hours. Labour has a parliamentary majority of more than 160.  

In an indication of the limited interest from the City of London, during a morning panel discussion Richard Harpin, the chief executive of Homeserve Plc and a Tory donor, asked the audience whether there was anyone from the private equity industry present. No one raised their hand. Harpin suggested they must have still been at breakfast.

To be sure, recent Tory governments had already damaged the party’s relationship with business. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson once dismissed business with a four-letter expletive, while his successor Liz Truss roiled the markets with a huge package of unfunded tax cuts. Truss was nevertheless the biggest draw at the Tory conference on Monday — if not at the business day event — holding a question-and-answer session in which she repeatedly bashed Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey. 

Nevertheless, speakers at the event — which was partially sponsored by Bloomberg — still used the opportunity to take a potshot at Britain’s new governing party. The day opened with Dominic Johnson, a Tory peer and former investment minister, asking the room if they had “buyers’ remorse” following a dip in business confidence since Labour took over.

Representatives from companies including HSBC, Barclays, Sainsbury’s, JP Morgan and Jaguar Land Rover were in attendance, although people at the event said most companies had not sent their top representatives. Business groups including the Confederation of British Industry, the Federation of Small Businesses and Tech UK were also in the room. 

“For us it’s about underlining our independence,” said Craig Beaumont, chief of external affairs at the FSB, who didn’t attend himself. “Even when it’s deeply unfashionable, we build relationships with those in opposition to underline that.”

Company leaders who have traveled to the conference in Birmingham were also hoping to ingratiate themselves with the remaining Tory leadership hopefuls — Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat. 

However anyone hoping to get some one-on-one time with the contenders at the evening drinks reception for business day attendees was likely to be disappointed. Instead of a speech from one of them — or even a shadow cabinet member — they were treated to Alan Mak, the shadow City minister who is not a household name.

The leadership race has been dominating the agenda at the conference, as the four candidates will be whittled down to two by Tory MPs next week before being put to the party membership for a final vote. 

Badenoch, Cleverly and Tugendhat all gave addresses at various points during business day, with Tugendhat — a known China skeptic — warning against fostering closer economic ties with the nation, which he said would come with strings attached. Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, meanwhile, warned that the party needed not to go down a “cul-de-sac” by pursuing a solely right-wing agenda chasing the votes of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party.

Because of the recent changeover in government, business was not expecting the opposition to adopt big policies but rather to play its part in good scrutiny of government policy and holding ministers to account, according to Beaumont at the FSB.

“The ideal is to have all the parties competing over who is the party of business,” he said.

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