This is Iain Martin’s subscriber newsletter.
Not that long ago, when it was a very nice place to visit, Britain’s two major parties used Bournemouth’s convention centre for their autumn party conferences, where activists gather with the leadership, business, lobby groups and political hacks.
Off we would toddle to the south coast town, which was several cuts above gritty Blackpool or grimy central Brighton, the locations favoured traditionally by Labour and the Tories. Bournemouth is a British seaside town so, of course, it surely had a seedier underbelly in the late 1990s. Yet for the most part, this town was English gentility and lower middle class manners in action, right down to there being a whiff of Basil and Sybil about some of the hotels. As a political editor, I once stayed in a conference hotel there that made Fawlty Towers look like the Ritz.
