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LONDON — Four days in a stuffy conference center surrounded by political nerds: It’s enough to make lukewarm wine appealing.
“It’s Glastonbury for geeks,” Labour adviser Matthew Torbitt said of Britain’s party conference season, in full swing this weekend as the Tories gather in Manchester. Just switch world-famous headliners and dawn raves for earnest panel events about High Speed Rail followed by late-night, booze-fueled networking sessions.
So what’s it like to do this notoriously drunken political fixture while swearing off the sauce — either for your health, your faith or just your sanity?
“When you get there on Sunday, there’s always a joke ‘oh, don’t go too hard tonight, pace yourself,’ because so much of conference centers around drinking,” said former Conservative special adviser James Starkie, who has been sober for three years and attending party conferences for a decade.
For Labour staffer Torbitt, this will be the first sober conference. But he’s feeling optimistic, “with a small note of caution.”
Torbitt is looking forward to waking up feeling moderately fresh, and actually being able to make it to early morning events. He says alcohol combined with the non-stop action of a party conference can be a dangerous combination.
“I had a laugh in many cases,” he recalled. “But at the same time, I was really stressed. I would be going mad and I’d be waking up and going in in the same suit.
“Maybe that’s because I’ve got issues or whatever, but judging by the people you see, it is everybody — and it’s just that this is what you put yourself through for a week.”
These four-day events aren’t just parties — and racing around trying to support politicians, gather intel and usefully schmooze can quickly take its toll.
“Conference can be stressful,” Torbitt said. “Everybody’s busy. Everybody has overfilled their diaries. So I understand why, sometimes, when you go into events, people choose to put a brave face on, and the wine or champagne would make people bearable and put you in a more social mood.”
Westminster on tour
In many ways, conference is a reflection of the Westminster bubble’s wider drinking culture — just transplanted to a city far beyond SW1.
Starkie, the former government adviser, said “conferences are the pinnacle of Westminster.”
“There are very few professions where there is such intermingling of your social and working life, so if you take the example of either a special adviser or a journalist, you’ll be working up until the deadline to seven or eight o’clock, but you might be going out for a drink or dinner with someone you work with, maybe for socializing, maybe for work,” he explained.
“So the line is blurred between what is work-related socializing and what is just socializing, which I think — if you don’t have a healthy relationship with alcohol — can tip you over the edge.”
Politics, Starkie said, is a “weird environment,” and drinking is a big part of what makes it tick — for better or worse. “Undeniably, the [House of] Commons terrace or the hotel bar where everyone gathers at party conference will be the center of someone embarrassing themselves,” he said.
Is water okay?
Mark McVitie, a political consultant for agency Pagefield has been sober for two years. He agrees that the hedonistic drinking on display at party conference is “an extension of” Westminster’s wider culture, where so much is “based around drinking.”
The comms pro says turning up to conference events where the free booze is being doled out can serve as “a very classic reminder of … not being like everyone else,” and laments the lack of options for sober conference-goers.
McVitie recalls one 2021 conference when he approached a bar to find there were zero non-alcoholic options. “It’s infantilizing,” he said. “It makes you feel like you’re not worthy, that it’s not even worthy to think about what we can provide for people who might not drink.”
There’s hope, however, that a boom in more adventurous non-alcoholic drinks, like zero percent beers and gins, will filter through to party conference — and that those who choose not to drink won’t have to carry around a glass of school-lunchtime orange juice at 11 p.m.
Although there are difficult elements of conference for those who don’t drink, be it temptation or annoyance at other people’s drunken antics, McVitie stressed doing the whole thing sober doesn’t guarantee a bad time.
“For people who are not drinking, it’s not like they can’t have a good experience at conference as well,” he said.
With a hungover Wednesday traipse back to London all-but certain for the conference boozers, the sober crowd might just be on to something.
