THE commentary about what we witnessed at Tory conference in Manchester ranges from disgust to astonishment via a dulled sense of bemusement.

We have been ground down to expect nothing less from these staged events, a sort of pantomime politics where the most terrible people gather to talk shit to each other, and now just make stuff up about totally imagined threats, grievances and enemies.

Party conferences are entirely performative acts – but they do have the substance of scene-setting and creating a narrative that the media will dutifully follow and we will be forced to imbibe.

What we are going to be forced to imbibe is the Trumpification of British politics combined with the tactics of his former adviser, Steve Bannon.

Some people object to references to Trump, arguing that it is too simplistic, but the strategies are very specific.

The first is to unapologetically abandon any attempt at fact-checking or commitment to rational discourse. Facts are entirely irrelevant, the entire discourse is around feelings and stories. This is post-fact politics.

The second is to “flood the zone”

with shit.

This is Bannon’s playbook. It stems from the first tactic but allows political operators to confuse the media and bamboozle the rolling news cycle by just putting out a torrent of nonsense.

In Manchester, this included horrific speeches about immigration, trans people in hospitals, mocking Nicola Sturgeon going to jail, the new threat of net zero, the war on motorists and on and on.

Next week, new demons will be conjured, new threats will be invented, no-one knows what they will be because they have no basis in reality, nor any grounding in political ideology, other than retaining power for power’s sake.

Rafael Behr writes in The Guardian: “The spectacle that has unfolded in Manchester this week is not just the endgame of a tired government. It is the late stages of moral and intellectual putrefaction. It is a once great party, hollowed out by a parasitical protest movement, collapsing into a parody of itself.”

Apart from the “once-great party” thing, he is right. We should avoid nostalgia for the former Tory Party of Norman Tebbit, Michael Portillo, Margaret Thatcher or Michael Forsyth, all of whom were awful in their own way.

But Behr’s comment points to the other way in which the Conservatives have veered into Trumpian political tactics, the way in which they both position themselves as outsiders and victims, and draw on a marginal and often imaginary external “protest movement”.

They are clearly a world away from one-nation Toryism, now teetering into a hybrid of Farageism and revived Powellism, relishing racist tropes and unencumbered by any sense of shame.

The apogee of all of this was Penny Mordaunt’s bizarre content-less speech about “fighting”. The tired and rancid politics of Suella Braverman was to be expected but Mordaunt’s performance took us into new territories. It was the strangest of speeches in a conference littered with them.

“Stand up and fight for the freedoms we have won,” she began.

“Against socialism, whether it is made of velvet or iron, have courage, and conviction – because when you do, you move our countrymen, our communities and capital of all kinds to our cause.”

She rumbled on merging party and country … “And when our party stands up and fights, the nation stands up and fights.

“And when our nation stands up and fights, other nations stand up and fight.”

There was certainly some confusion growing at this point as to why nations fighting each other was such a good thing but she thundered on.

“And they stand up and fight for the things for which the entire progress of humanity depends!”

Pausing briefly for air, she went on: “Freedom. That is what Conservatives do.

“That is what this nation does.”

Now reaching a crescendo of sorts, Mordaunt concluded: “Have courage. Bring hope. Stand up and fight.”

Finally, she shouted into the abyss: “Stand up and fight!”

BRITISH party politics is no stranger to weird oratory. John Major was a bromide, Theresa May could barely string a sentence together, Rishi Sunak has had a charisma bypass, and Tony Blair – often praised as a great communicator – had a weird strangled delivery. But Mordaunt’s speech was something else. It was dramatic and highly polished – even if in such a strange way. It was performed rather than delivered.

But what did it all mean? What could it possibly mean?

It was deliberately void of meaning from a party at “the late stages of moral and intellectual putrefaction”, but if it meant anything at all, it had echoes of Trump’s rhetoric as MAGA troops stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The speech, while wildly mocked and ridiculed, was actually perfect for the new hybrid party.

If facts are redundant, so are sense and rational discourse. Politicians don’t need policies or even coherent ideas they just need to spew out feelings and rough inchoate groupings of words. The audience – baffled but aroused – lapped it up, as they so often do with Mordaunt’s performances.

Fighting. Freedom. Capital. Hope. Standing Up.

These are the words, this is the message.

The framing is simple – you, the ubiquitous “you”, are under attack. The enemy is unknown and everywhere.

It’s probably the Wokerati, it’s definitely that dangerous radical Sir Keir Starmer, it’s probably your council imposing recycling on you, or taking away your car, or your boiler, it may be the Jocks or the foreigners or the immigrants, or the EU or the Remainers or the experts or the elite, or the globalists … on and on it can spiral. Threats are everywhere and the only response is to fight.

It’s not so much a speech as a call to be vigilant. This is the New Conservatives desperately evoking imagined threats and a condition of perpetual arousal, evoking deep paranoia and a state of constant fear.

As Sunak’s government slides down the opinion polls and Starmer’s government appears an inevitability on the horizon, the desperation of the party to cling to power intensifies.

Manchester was less about speaking to the party than fighting among themselves.

The dark irony for Suella Braverman or Kemi Badenoch is the Conservative Party is far too racist to elect them, (and, no, Sunak isn’t an example that refutes this point.) Despite the ridicule, Penny Mordaunt will be the next leader of the Conservatives, babbling incoherent fear and mouthing meta messages of threats everywhere. This is the new politics.

Mordaunt and Sunak have both tried to describe themselves as inheritors and mimics of Thatcher. But for Thatcher, the threats were very real and very clear.

They were the enemy within, the miners and other trade unionists, the hidden communists and the threat of the left.

For all Mordaunt’s weird talk of “velvet” or “iron” socialism, her task was to evoke fear in the most general sense.

After 13 years of Tory government, and decades before that, the terrible monsters of socialism have long been slain, and what we are left with is strange people clinging to power and swinging their swords of oratory around their heads in the hope of landing a blow.