Forget the party conference glitches, the government’s skills test says I should become a boxer
Monday
If you’re going to have a virtual party conference then it’s as well to either have a functioning online platform or to keep the whole thing as low key as possible. The Tories somehow managed to do neither, even though none of their keynote speakers seemed to have anything of interest to say. The website itself was a total disaster. Friends who had logged in over the weekend reported major glitches with the site and they were still in evidence when I checked in today. First off it took me an age to actually find any sign of life. After several failed attempts to get in to a “fireside’ chat” with Gavin Williamson, I ended up in a fringe event with Steve Barclay that was buffering so badly it was impossible to tell if he was talking sense or not – my guess is not – and the only way to leave the meeting was to switch off and reboot my laptop. After I had logged back in, the only way I managed to catch Rishi Sunak’s short and sweet 10-minute lightness of being keynote speech was by catching up on Facebook later on as the icon for the main auditorium had gone missing from the front page of the website. It was the advertisers I felt most sorry for though, as most had paid thousands of pounds for the pleasure of not being able to be found by visitors. The online exhibition hall turned out to be pitch black with just a few icons that only worked intermittently. It took several attempts to find some jewellery I didn’t want, along with some face masks, greeting cards and Boris Johnson T-shirts that I didn’t want. The weirdest stand was something called “Rose Garden”, which I had imagined might be an online garden centre. Instead all I got was a 30-second video of Boris Johnson in a high-vis jacket making various promises that he had no idea if he could keep that was playing on a loop. Somehow it felt like a metaphor for the entire conference.
