Chaos at the conference
Notorious prankster with police record is given conference pass and gets feet from PM
TORY chairman Patrick McLoughlin, Scotland Yard and Manchester police were in the dock last night over a security shambles that let a notorious prankster disrupt the Prime Minister’s conference speech.
Despite the heightened terror threat, Simon Brodkin was able to approach Theresa May at the podium, hand her a mock P45, and stand by her for several seconds.
The 40-year-old comedian, who uses the stage name Lee Nelson, was not immediately tackled to the ground by any of Mrs May’s close protection officers.
He remained in the hall for more than a minute, approaching Cabinet ministers including Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.
There was ‘real Cabinet anger’ about the failure to protect the Prime Minister, according to a report on BBC Newsnight.
It emerged that Brodkin had been handed accreditation to attend the conference in Manchester despite receiving a conditional caution in 2013 – for posing as a player on the pitch during a Premier League game between Everton and Manchester City.
While a caution is technically not a criminal conviction, it can show up under criminal record checks, and can be taken into account if the offender is sentenced for another crime. It raises serious questions about what checks were carried out on Brodkin.
Yesterday it appeared the prankster had been able to get into the hall for the speech without a ticket, simply by queuing up. Once inside, he is believed to have posed as one of the ushers to get near the front – seemingly without anyone checking his credentials. MPs and security experts last night warned he could easily have been a terrorist who could have killed the Prime Minister.
But Sir Patrick – whom Mrs May was already facing pressure to sack following the election – insisted there was adequate security.
Asked if he was scared during the interruption, he said: ‘I knew there was sufficient security around the Prime Minister. Of course there will be an investigation. There will be an inquiry into what happened.’ On an extraordinary day: Cabinet ministers tried to rally round Mrs May after she was also hit by a severe coughing fit and a collapsing set;
Her performance set off a fresh
‘Shows security is very lax’ ‘Could have been a terrorist’
wave of speculation about her future, with one ex-minister calling the speech ‘an absolute disaster’;
The Prime Minister used the speech to unveil a string of policies on housing, energy and foreign aid, designed to show she is listening to voters’ concerns;
More controversy surrounded Boris Johnson, over comments on Libya and a video showing Amber Rudd telling him to give Mrs May a standing ovation.
George Freeman MP, who chairs Mrs May’s policy board, said of the incident: ‘There should be some very serious questions – that could have been a terrorist. Questions will be asked about how he was allowed to get that close.’
Brexit Secretary David Davis said it was ‘extraordinary’ that a prankster was able to get so close to Mrs May, adding: ‘We’ll have to look into it and see how it happened.’
Last night, police admitted Brodkin had secured ‘legitimate accreditation’ for the conference, under his real name. It is thought he may have secured the pass by claiming he was attached to one of the conference exhibitors.
Guidance on the Tory conference website says attendees must be vetted by the party and Greater Manchester Police before they are given accreditaton. It was unclear last night how these checks had failed to flag up Brodkin’s past.
Just before the stunt, he was seen crouching next to Mrs May’s podium in the photographer’s pit. He wore a blue tie, white shirt and suit trousers and was indistinguishable from Tory delegates, who simply queue up for the speech if they have a conference pass.
After approaching Mrs May without anyone intervening, Brodkin handed her the P45, which she took from him as he gave a thumbs-up to Mr Johnson.
Brodkin then moved towards the Foreign Secretary with both thumbs up and crouched down next to Miss Rudd before he was eventually escorted out by what was believed to be an usher.
The Prime Minister’s close protection officers are provided by Scotland Yard. Last night the force refused to comment on why Brodkin had got so close to her.
Home Secretary Amber Rudd also has close protection officers who escort her around the conference venue, but none could be seen close by during the incident.
As he was removed, Brodkin told reporters: ‘Boris told me to do it. He’s left me in the lurch.’ The prankster was led away in handcuffs and placed in the back of a police van. He had a purple badge, believed to have been given to exhibitors, with his name on.
GMP Chief Superintendent John O’Hare ordered a review of the accreditation process, and said everyone at the conference was subject to ‘airport-style searches’.
A Downing Street source said: ‘Greater Manchester Police have arrested a man for breach of the peace. We expect there will be a thorough investigation.’ A Tory spokesman said the party was working with police to review accreditation and security.
Security expert John Bayliss, who advises royal and diplomatic close protection officers, warned: ‘He could have been carrying a knife in a padded envelope and the Prime Minister could be dead.’
Theresa May’s speech yesterday was a car crash for reasons largely beyond her control. But even if that were not the case, it would have come across as timid, defensive and over-crafted. here is an alternative version of the speech she should have given, which has been edited for reasons of space.
UNLIKE most of you at this conference, I am not obsessed with Jeremy Corbyn.
At the next general election in nearly five years’ time I don’t believe the British people will choose as their prime minister a Marxist clown who is a friend to terrorists — and whose favourite country in the world is socialist Venezuela, where the rate of inflation reached 800 per cent, and the supermarket shelves are empty of even the basic necessities.
The idea that Corbyn has some magic formula which the Conservative Party should borrow is preposterous. So let’s stop being fixated by this man. I shan’t mention him again.
I’m sorry that we didn’t achieve an overall majority at the election, and I take full responsibility for what happened. We would have done much better if we had spoken proudly of our economic achievements.
In 2010, we inherited a mess from Labour, which is always the way, with the Tories having to pick up the pieces after socialist economic disasters.
And we did. We were told in 2010 that unemployment would soar. It is now at a 40-year low, while employment is at an all-time high.
Wages have not risen as much as we would have liked, but it has been worse throughout most of Europe, where austerity since the Great Recession has bitten much harder.
It’s laughable to read in Remainer newspapers, and hear on the anti-Brexit BBC, that the UK is growing more slowly than the rest of Europe, without it being said that over the past five years this country has grown much more quickly.
Struggle
Look at Italy, whose economy is the same size it was in 2000, and count your blessings that we ignored Michael Heseltine and Tony Blair’s devout wish, and didn’t join the euro.
Of course, we all want a fairer society, but you don’t achieve that by throwing hundreds of billions at doomed projects, as the economically illiterate Labour Party proposes. I actually want to make the moral case for lower taxes because I believe passionately that families spend money more wisely than the State.
Tory policies have reduced the deficit by nearly threequarters. It’s been a struggle, but we have wiped out most of the mess Labour left us. We can’t rest until the deficit has been brought down to zero, and we start paying off our debt of nearly £2 trillion.
Yes, we should build a fairer society. Labour — which is now engaged in naked class war — is factually wrong when it says the gap between the rich and the poor has widened. According to the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, it has narrowed over the past decade, markedly so in London.
That is because we Tories have given tax cuts to the poorly paid, so that nearly half of people now pay no income tax at all. But I accept many people are justifiably outraged when they see fat-cat bosses awarding themselves multi-million-pay increases which don’t reflect their companies’ performance.
We will honour our manifesto pledge and give shareholders the right to have a direct say in how much directors are paid.
And we will also honour our manifesto pledge to curb the rapacious energy companies — many of them foreignowned, and with no discernible feelings of social responsibility — which think they can slap on increases to the bills of loyal customers as they fancy.
They are guilty of abusing their market position, which is why we intend to bring in a draft Bill next week to put a price cap on energy bills.
Dream
Housing is another justifiable grievance. In truth, the dream of a property-owning democracy is under threat. One reason, which is very seldom mentioned, is the recent very high rate of immigration, which according to reputable studies is responsible for not far short of half of housing demand.
How could it be otherwise when, over the past few years, net immigration has averaged around 300,000 annually — roughly equivalent to a city the size of Nottingham? We are where we are, but one among several benefits of bringing down net immigration to below 100,000 is that in future years we won’t have to build so many houses in our already overcrowded country.
As for the present, we will expand the right- to- buy programme, which is an incentive to the building of homes. If necessary we will further liberalise the planning laws to encourage building on greenfield sites, but first of all we will impose a land tax on developers who sit on brownfield sites which already have planning permission.
Let me say a word about my former colleague George Osborne, who now edits the London Evening Standard, from which he daily hurls paper darts intended to undermine the cause of Brexit — and me.
In many ways, George was a good Chancellor, but in his dying days he rashly raised stamp duty on houses over £1 million and on properties for buy-to-let landlords.
This has slowed down the housing market at a time when it is already experiencing some jitters over Brexit. The new Chancellor, Philip Hammond — himself somewhat too prone to Brexit jitters — will address the issue of stamp duty in next month’s Budget.
On student loans I will say this. It’s true some universities have greedily raised tuition fees to the maximum level for courses which in some cases are, frankly, sub- standard. It grieves me to see young people mortgaging their futures for degrees that are not worth the paper they are written on.
But Labour’s idea of abolishing fees, even if it were affordable, which it certainly is not, would have the effect of making an 18-year-old electrician subsidise out of his wages an 18-year-old student doing a Mickey-Mouse course. That isn’t fair. As in so many other areas, Labour’s proposals are both lunatic and inequitable.
Energy
What I intend to say about Brexit is quite simple. It is an opportunity for a new global Britain. Dear old Boris may be wrong about many things, but he is absolutely right to enjoin us all to display more optimism about the future.
We shouldn’t be droning on in a lugubrious way about snags and impediments — are you listening, Philip? — but dwell instead on the wonderful possibilities that lie ahead. If we believe in our country, in its energy and creativity, we should also believe it will have a glorious future after Brexit.
Only today we learnt that the British scientist Richard Henderson has won a Nobel prize for chemistry. Congratulations! Did you know that Britain has won more Nobel prizes than France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands combined? We gather here today in Manchester, the cradle of the
first industrial revolution, in whose enterprising university the ultra-light, and immensely tough, material graphene was not long ago discovered.
In the Times World University rankings for 2017, Britain boasts four universities among the top 20, including the highest placed, oxford. How many does the entire rest of the EU have? none. Enough of this whingeing about our future.
on the subject of Brexit, we receive regular lectures from michel Barnier, a former French minister, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the erstwhile long-serving prime minister of Luxembourg (population a quarter that of Greater manchester), now President of the European Commission. We are happy to indulge these garrulous bully-boys. But I should point out that in recent weeks the EU has experienced mounting problems. a far-right party is — once again — on the march in Germany. Catalonia threatens to break away from Spain, whose aggressive tactics have attracted no reproaches, and certainly no lectures, from mr Juncker.
our own remainers in the Press and Parliament ventilate about the imagined difficulties of Brexit, but disregard the EU’s actual tribulations. may I suggest that the border between northern Ireland and the republic of Ireland, which so exercises mr Barnier, may soon become rather less significant than the border between Catalonia and Spain?
I am not a woman for gimmicks. I don’t like soundbites. I simply believe that Tory values will always have so much to offer this country, and that we should stop aping Labour’s half-baked and potentially destructive ideas.
The public will see through them soon enough. We trust the people. We abhor class war. We think that fairness and markets can co-exist.
We also believe the family is the bedrock of society and should be fostered wherever possible by the State — not that I have heard such sentiments being expressed here this week.
I love this country and have every confidence in its future, and know in my bones that the British people will never be drawn to the clapped-out ideas of a dotty, superannuated marxist.