11/09/00 - Trendy young Tories in The Times

Trendy young Tories

Delegates at the young Conservatives' annual bash insist they have shaken off their fogeyish image. Helen Rumbelow reports

Where were Britain's most rebellious young things this weekend? Did they sneak off to a gathering of one of the most maligned and underground sectors of youth culture, the kind organised only through e-mail and mobile phone numbers passed to the trusted few?

No, I'm not talking about a rave, but the annual conference of the young Conservatives, now trendily renamed Conservative Future. "It's like a secret code," says one arriving at Essex University for a weekend that will include speeches, seminars and socialising. "We see each other on the bus and say 'are you going to the, er, thing here today?'"

They certainly need a way of finding each other, for the telltale fogeyish suits of the old Young Conservatives have been replaced by combat trousers and trainers. Only two of the 120 pale white young men have contravened their invitation's instructions and worn ties, and look unusually awkward beneath the conference's nightclub-like banners emblazoned with "Are you up for it?".

"We'll tighten their ties so hard they'll soon take them off," says Chris Kelly, from Oxford Brookes University, apparently joking. By the first coffeebreak the shamefaced offenders are looking even more awkward - without their ties.

Image is vital to Conservative Future, whose membership is rising now for the first time in two decades and stands at 8,000.

Two years ago, William Hague put the Young Conservatives out of their misery. The organisation's glory days of calls to hang Nelson Mandela, mooning at the press, trashing ballrooms, and lisping fundamentalists whom even Harry Enfield's Tory Boy could hardly spoof, were finally over. Now, with the Tories stripped of their arrogance, tuition fees making Labour unpopular on campuses and the cachet of being anti-Establishment, Conservative Futurists may have a chance at acquiring something unprecedented: cool.

Of course, it is hard to stay trendy when you have paid Pounds 35 to spend two days setting up a mock Parliament to debate whether Father Christmas is a capitalist. Especially when you are being watched like hawks by two silent, sinister men from Conservative Central Office, talent-spotting in case of a sudden general election. Even the group's new mentor, Steven Norris - who, at 55, is just seven years younger than the average age of the Conservative Party, confesses that as a student he would not have been seen dead at such a bash.

"At Oxford they seemed like a bunch of pointless hoorays, and I was, well, normal," he says, shepherding his new fans to lunch in the student canteen. "But this is what is so exciting - they are not hoorays or nerds, just perfectly normal people."

Norris is charged with grooming them over the weekend during an intensive programme of speeches from Tory top brass, debates on sex and drugs, and media training from a former BBC presenter.

Like nearly all those attending, Norris is a firsttimer and, like them, exudes an air of profound relief. OK, so some of them claim to have become political by watching Margaret Thatcher's 1979 win on television at the age of five, and a few make noises about sending asylum-seekers back and stringing up drug users. But there are no obvious freaks, and young fogies are firmly in the minority. The general feeling is that the turnout is better than anyone had expected.

The Prom King and Queen of this new movement are Tom Bursnall, the national chairman, 21, from Warwick University, and his blonde, pink boob-tube wearing girlfriend, Abigail Ferdinand, a local chairman. "Well, I wouldn't go out with a communist," Bursnall says, adding that Norman Tebbit is his political hero: "He's a good man, he stands up for what he believes in."

The pair went to state school, as did most of the others, he says. They sport London accents, Gucci watches and the latest fashions. But while he does a deadly mocking impersonation of those who arrived in ties, Bursnall is not quite confident enough to wear his "CF" T-shirt down the pub. "Don't be stupid, mate. I'd be lynched if I wore this!"

This is why it is safer to have the disco on campus, though it will be woefully short on women. Ferdinand is one of only two dozen females, up on last year's grand total of three. Others include Krystal Miller, 21, from Southampton University, and Stacie Haskayne-Middleton, 21, who say people are often surprised at what they get up to in their free time. "It's not how people imagine: we're a snapshot of university students," says Miller.

At the disco, no one drinks 14 pints, but as their unusual confidence spills on to the dance floor men dance in groups, while others exchange cards from their jobs in advertising and financial PR.

Along with women, black faces are also conspicuous by their absence. At one point the group is asked to put their hands up if they have black friends. All say they do, but a little unsurely, as if it were a trick question. They are told to go home and not just start their own personal media campaigns, but to reach out to their female and black friends and "offer them something". Although just what remains unclear.

What is clear is that a third of the Conservative MPs in the last Parliament came via this organisation. The party desperately needs not just their youth and "normality", but also more black people, women, and charisma. Being Young and Conservative always sounded like a contradiction in terms - the present organisation's task is to ensure that the same is not said about Conservative and Future.