WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Bethlehem, by comparison, would have seemed positively spacious. If you ever needed confirmation that Britain expects its next government to be formed by David Cameron, you should have been in Manchester in early October. Even if you could have found one, a stable would have been charging several hundred pounds a night – with straw extra.
I confess that I was, until this month, a political party conference virgin. I have never seen the point of filling in (months in advance) lots of forms that require everything from my National Insurance number to my blood type, and then going to a place where lots of worthy types stand around discussing the finer points of policies that are unlikely to see the light of day.
But times change, and small business owners need to get closer to the people who will probably form the next government. I was not alone. Even my Media Entrepreneur Girlfriend, the daughter of a famous Marxist historian and so not a likely visitor to Manchester, turned up. MEG did look a little sheepish, as though she expected her family or her former classmates at Camden High School for Girls to jump out from behind a plant in the Midland Hotel and shout “traitor!” But she went with the flow and lingered in fringe sessions listening to shadow cabinet members.
I am encouraged by the ideas that Cameron & Co are suggesting for small businesses. A lower rate of corporation tax is to be encouraged, as is an automatic right to business rate relief for smaller companies. The Conservatives seem to have woken up to the fact that the vast majority of businesses in the UK (and by that, I mean more than 90 per cent) employ fewer than 250 people.
I had expected it would be busy. I had expected that the food would be expensive. I was not even surprised to queue for my lunch in the conference hall and then find I had to sit on the floor to eat it. But I was not prepared for the canapé pricing strategy of the conference caterers. This year, my business has been represented at all three main party conferences. At each, we have sponsored a fringe event, hosted by the employment charity Tomorrow’s People, on the subject of intergenerational joblessness. (In Manchester, I leafleted delegates to drum up attendance, a humbling experience as people rushed past, averting their gaze.)
As is customary at these events, we provided refreshments. (Not champagne. Our prospective prime minister had decreed that he didn’t wish to see his senior team members standing around drinking fizz, so we served some pretty average wine at £18.50 a bottle.) But we had ordered canapés, for 30 people, at £10 a head.
All £300 of it turned up on one smallish serving dish. Each canapé was about 2cm square at most. And each one cost more than £3. I needed something stronger than my reading glasses (1.5x) just to see them. Forget eating them, I suggested that we frame them – on a surface-area basis they were more valuable than anything Damien Hirst has produced. Even better, let’s put them in the Bank of England to help make up for the gold that our current prime minister sold off when he was chancellor of the exchequer.
As the conference caterers discovered, serving inadequate and overpriced canapés to guests of Mrs Moneypenny is something you do at your peril. I chewed up and spat out not the food, but the poor catering manger assigned to our fringe event, despite his perfectly valid assertion that this was all we had ordered. In future, I shall insist on seeing a life-size photograph of what I am buying. Extra food was produced, but the level of under-catering combined with a very popular event (Theresa May spoke and, for once, no one was worrying about her footwear) meant that we had a challenge on our hands.
Forget Bethlehem. It was more a case of loaves and fishes.
