Readers, I have been to a few political conferences in my time. But none of them were as empty, miserable, or downright weird as CPAC GB. Having heard that Liz Truss was bringing the American conservative jamboree across the Atlantic, I felt obliged to go, and comforted myself that there would at least be a bar to flee to if it all got too grotesque. But there was no bar. Or at least there wasn’t until I discovered the secret pathway from the Intercontinental Hotel that emerged next to the O2’s Wetherspoons. Until then, being cursed with vision, hearing and sanity meant enduring an event that made Truss’s premiership look like a model of tact and foresight.

It was shallow, senseless and utterly detrimental to the conservative cause it claimed to champion

It was shallow, senseless and utterly detrimental to the conservative cause it claimed to champion

For the uninitiated, CPAC stands for Conservative Political Action Conference. In the US of A, it has been a staple of the right-wing calendar for decades, with would-be presidents, shock jocks and activists uniting to slap each other on the back about how marvellous assault rifles are and mutter darkly about abortion. As with the National Conservatism conference three years ago, this sort of Yankee politics is on a sticky wicket in Britain. We don’t do God; we find earnestness unappealing. To misquote David Bowie: we’re afraid of Americans, we’re afraid of the world.

That several of my friends had given up and headed back to Westminster before I’d even arrived didn’t fill me with confidence. But once I’d made my way out to the No Man’s Land of North Greenwich and breezed through the endearingly lax security, I was confronted by a ghost town. The main hall was three-quarters empty, even when my redoubtable chum Jacob Rees-Mogg was speaking. More people were staffing the........

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