Author Archives: Alix Mortimer

Following LVT fringe on Saturday I want nothing so much as a nice hot cup of tea and a sit down, but instead I slouch along ten minutes’ worth of regenerational dockland to the Crowne Plaza, where I gather with other bloggers to guzzle free wine and get congratulated in public by impressive people until I go all red and gruff and shuffly. My trophy isn’t really big enough to drink wine out of with any conviction but it does look damnably like it would take a large boiled egg just perfectly, and that’s the important thing.

James Graham warns me and the People’s Choice category winner, my very own homebody MP Lynne Featherstone, that our opinions will now forever be measured against our status as award winners. I don’t think this bothers the board-sweeping Hornsey & Wood Green contingent too much. Lynne’s point of view is already public property anyway, and mine is generally so fractal that there are few opinions I will not painstakingly obfuscate with detail and caveat to the point where people inevitably lose track of why they objected to them in the first place.

No, I am far more concerned, this being the Campaign for Gender Balance, about my hair, which I have not brushed properly for the whole of the five hours up to the point where I have to have my picture taken, and my general appearance, which is located somewhere on a given 3D matrix between “hungover”, “beige” and “dead”. It’s not easy hitting the big time without warning. Or a hairbrush. James Graham, of course, is used to all this and has been swept into town in a cloud of stardust (albeit with an hour’s delay at Crewe) to sit on the panel of a fringe-meeting, present an award, and then be whisked off back to celeb-land (or at least Warrington).

Our Vince Cable the Able was the main event of a lot of people’s Saturday conference. It will therefore surprise precisely no-one to see that the Red Box is desperately attaching electrodes to the equine corpse of the “Should Vince have stood?” non-issue. The giveaway in such tedious toilet paper coverage is that it actually devalues Cable – the man supposedly being praised – as much as Clegg, as if the shadow chancellor’s function is limited to providing a compare-and-contrast exercise for the media.

Continuing in the little-known twenty four hours later school of live-blogging, we come to the moment on Saturday morning when I unglue my eyelids just in time to hear Brian Paddick deliver his London setpiece.

He is as impressive as ever, and plays on his background in just the right way – “I’m not a politician. I don’t know much about talk, but  I do know a lot about delivery”. His main hitpoints are crime, housing and transport, and increasingly his speeches use his life experience as a personal sidelight on all of them, not just crime. I am

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