Truth be told, I did not know what to expect when I set off to report on CPAC Great Britain. I had a faint idea, having interviewed the chairman, Liz Truss, about the matter a handful of weeks ago, but I lacked any concrete understanding of what it would really look like in practice.
I had seen and attended similar conferences before. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference (ARC), from just a few weeks ago, is perhaps the most notable – a gathering of right-of-centre individuals and organisations from around the world, all discussing the same issues under the same roof. A simple enough recipe to emulate, one would think.
No conference, though, had ever sought to import American-style politics in quite the way CPAC Great Britain had.
The name itself is lifted directly from its American counterpart, and the cheap imports only became more apparent from there. Prior to the conference officially opening, a prayer was held, and an American pastor took to the stage, claiming that the clawback of “western civilization” would begin “when God’s people repent.”
Immediately, I braced myself – not in a way that sought to dismiss the importance of religion in our politics or public debate, but in a way that saw the blatant, American-style copy-and-paste approach for what it was. Given this was the opening of the conference, I expected the pattern to continue throughout the day – and I was right.
As Matt Schlapp and Liz Truss took to the stage to formally begin proceedings, the auditorium was met with flashing red and blue lights alongside booming rock music. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our first ever CPAC GB,” Truss proclaimed to the half-empty room.
I felt as though I was in some pound shop MAGA rally – and the hats embroidered with “Make Britain Great Again” didn’t particularly help matters.
The rhetoric which was on show worked in tandem with the staging, though. Matt Goodwin repeatedly discussed the need to focus on “western civilization,” and his Reform UK ally Suella Braverman took to the stage later in the day, fighting back against what she saw as the rise of “socialism” and “indoctrination.” I note that she didn’t account for the fact that just a few months ago, she boasted that Reform UK would adopt socialist policies…
Now, I recognise that many will point out that these are important ideas, and that dismissing them as nothing more than MAGA-adjacent buzzwords would be a disservice to their importance, yet the fact remains that these phrases simply do not possess the same cut-through in the UK as they do in the United States.
Across the pond, they’re thrown around so often that they’ve become entrenched in everyday life – anyone who wants any kind of government intervention, however small, risks being branded a socialist or worse, a communist. This matters because the people of the UK are not preoccupied with the supposed “radical left.” They’re preoccupied with the cost of living, the NHS, and the affordability of housing. They simply don’t subscribe to the American style of thinking, and it’s something I’d contend CPAC GB’s organisers overlooked entirely.
As an organisation, they seek to take very real and complex issues and simplify them down into slogans imported from another country’s politics. This amounts to nothing more, in my view, than a series of shoddy, populist gimmicks. Whether the British public is quite so easily taken in is another matter – though given the conference felt very much like an echo chamber, I would wager the answer is no.
The main auditorium was occupied by those who’d come to rally against the modern left, yes, but outside it was a different story. Empty corridors and vacant seating areas were the norm, with some commentators posting about the sheer emptiness of the conference on social media. When I asked one attendee to summarise the conference in one word, they grinned from ear to ear before putting it plainly:
“Sparse.”
The scarcity of people would already be a problem in its own right, were it not for the fact that there was very little in the way of amenities either. A small coffee cost a staggering £3 – a price so extortionate that one attendee told me they’d taken the mug it was served in as compensation.
Given such ludicrous prices, surely, at least, lunch was provided? Wrong.
Guests were forced to make the arduous ten-minute trek to North Greenwich Tube station for an overpriced Subway sandwich or a barebones WHSmith meal deal.
But perhaps the worst sin of all? There was no on-site bar. The hacks I spoke to were livid, to the extent that two of them, having been at the conference for just thirty minutes, gave up and went in search of the nearest pub.
The anger felt by attendees, though, wasn’t solely directed at the lack of booze – it extended to the ideas being discussed on stage. Over the course of the day, I ran a series of informal vox-pops between the headline speeches to get a better sense of what attendees on the ground were actually thinking.
From those conversations, it was clear, first and foremost, that the crowd spanned a wide range of the right. Social media influencers such as Young Bob and BasednBougie mingled with politicians including Andrea Jenkyns and Andrew Griffith – though I’m told Griffith came of his own accord, rather than at the party’s instruction.
One individual I spoke to stood out in particular, however. He was a guest from overseas, and I asked him what he made of Britain and its future. “The UK is not safe at all – for children especially,” he told me, adding that “you can’t go outside in London by yourself – you’ll get stabbed.” It was a striking conclusion, which was fuelled by his views on migration. Believing that most crime is committed by illegal migrants, he argued the government should “just shut the door for illegal migrants.” Throughout the conversation, there was little of what I would term optimism – the talk centred on how bad Britain was, or what it should avoid doing, rather than what it did well or where it might go from here.
What was of note, though, wasn’t the views themselves so much as how many guests from outside the UK subscribed to them. CPAC GB had sought to import American-style politics, and with it came an audience that was convinced it understood the complexities of a country it didn’t call home.
Despite it all – the empty seats, the imported slogans, the £3 coffees – CPAC GB’s organisers are convinced this is the beginning of something bigger. That this Trumpian style of politics could well be the future of conservatism for the UK.
I think there is a genuine debate to be had about the future of the right and conservatism in the UK. However, upon spending a few hours there, I was convinced of the opposite. This is most definitely not the future of the right, and one moment struck me as emblematic of the whole experience.
In the back of the exhibition hall sat a golf simulator. Liz Truss, egged on by the advisors around her, picked up a driver and took to the range. She readied her shot and missed. Realigning herself, she scuffed the second so badly it veered wildly to the right.
It was the perfect metaphor for the gathering. Truss set out to realign British politics – and ended up missing so badly that all she achieved was pushing herself further to the right. It was the perfect ending to the day.