The Tories head to Manchester for a pared down conference – but no city deserves the Boris Johnson poison

It’s a can-do place with an entrepreneurial spirit, a self-assured swagger and a social conscience. No wonder the Conservatives wish some of that magic would rub off on them

You have to feel for Manchester. It is the best of Britain, about to play host to its worst.

MPs’ decision to reject a parliamentary recess for the Conservative Party conference next week won’t lance the boil – even in a diluted form the Tories will still descend on the city for their annual shin-dig, as they have every other year for some time.

I lived there for three years and grew to love the place. It is a vibrant, exciting, outward looking, multicultural city. It’s no surprise that it voted strongly in favour of Remain.

Even so, you can see why the controlling brains of the party, when it still had some conception of decency, liked the idea of Manchester as a venue. It has the facilities, of course, and there are quite a few marginals in the north west.

The party was also trying to make a statement: We care about the north (despite the fact that our policies have frequently called that into question).

But it’s not just that.

Manchester can point to visible successes in any number of fields. Sports, the arts, music, science, education, the media, business.

It’s a can-do city that has always had a certain entrepreneurial spirit, a robust confidence, a self-assured swagger.

Those are characteristics held in high esteem by traditional Tories. In fact, they’d like to claim a monopoly on them if they could.

However, those attributes run through the DNA of a place that is fiercely loyal to Labour. This is partly because the city cares deeply about the pockets of poverty on its streets, knows that they have been exacerbated by the Tories’ austerity, and would like to see them tackled.

The council is no longer a one party state, as it was a few short years ago, but there are still just four opposition members. In none of the other northern metropolises is Labour’s dominance so complete.

This year’s curtailed Tory conference will see a party frantically trying to hold itself together as Brexit tears it apart, and when we look at Manchester’s history, there lies another grand issue that threatened the same. The city was the birthplace of the Manchester Liberals, who extolled the virtues of free trade and campaigned against the protectionist corn laws that kept food prices artificially high to the benefit of Tory farmers.

The city’s famous adoptive son Richard Cobden, was one of the leaders of that movement, and also signed the first modern free trade agreement, the Cobden-Chevalier treaty, with France.

The irony is clear. Boris Johnson will be the star turn of a gathering of people who fetishise “free trade” and yet want to drag Britain out of the biggest free trade zone the world has ever seen. Instead, his government seems determined to throw up walls with its biggest trading partner.

Cobden must be turning in his grave.

Manchester hasn't hosted the Tories with unchecked enthusiasm. The protests against it have been loud and passionate and on Johnson’s watch the party has morphed into something still more deserving of them.

The party that called itself “conservative” has died. In its place is something much worse: a nationalist cult in thrall to a prancing bully who flirts with, and frequently crosses into the fetid swamp of the extreme right. A leader who is willing to flippantly dismiss the threats and intimidation experienced by colleagues, threats which sometimes quote him directly.

This flawed and spoiled man’s latest performance in the House of Commons was grotesque. But no less foul was the baying mob behind him. He maintains his position in part because he is surrounded by a corps of enablers who have no more shame than he has.

Manchester may yet witness worse from him, new lows as he seeks to fire up the radicalised pensioners who form the bedrock of his support and will hang on his every rotten word.

The city is famous for the downpours that lash in from the Atlantic. Not for nothing does it call itself “the rainy city”.

It will need a deluge for the ages to clean away the poison that Johnson and his friends will pour forth for however many days they manage to cobble together.

As he tried to head off today’s latest revolt by MPs, Johnson claimed the conference was important to the city’s economy. I think it would happily manage without his dirty money.

No doubt the good, liberal and true protestors of this great northern powerhouse will gather in numbers to give voice to that.