I’ve just started getting invitations to the 2026 party conference season. Only this year, with five political parties all polling (YouGov, March 11) within 10% of each other and the Tories (at 19%) catching up Reform (23%) on the inside rail, it’s looking like it could be an exhausting two month season.

Attending the Tory party conference last year as a new Conservative peer, as opposed to a lowly hack, was definitely  an upgrade. I was asked to do two events on the main stage, which was a first, although not altogether flattering. The Times sketch writer noted that there were only three people in the audience when I addressed the party faithful on Sunday and reminded his readers that I’d once written a book called The Sound of No Hands Clapping. 

Nevertheless, I quite enjoyed being a gamekeeper rather than an ink-stained poacher. My hotel room was considerably nicer.   The hardest thing about becoming a peer is the number of rules you’ve got to master. I feel like a new boy at the world’s oldest and stuffiest public school. It’s the steepest learning curve I’ve been on and I speak as someone who was plucked from Fleet Street obscurity to work as an editor at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s and then hired as an untested screenwriter by Joel Silver, the most powerful producer in Hollywood, to write a picture. (It didn’t get made.)

I attended a series of induction sessions shortly …