The 2026 Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham was a four-day attempt to show a party that has stopped arguing with itself and started arguing with Andy Burnham’s Labour government instead. Held at the ICC from Sunday 4 to Wednesday 7 October, it was smaller and quieter than the old set-piece conferences, more united behind Kemi Badenoch, and built around one document and a run of tax, defence and welfare pledges. Sunday: the principles Badenoch opened by welcoming dele

The Conservative Party Conference DAY 1 TimeTable: TIME MP & SESSION 13:00 Resolution Foundation / Rigby Foundation: Steve Rigby, Dr Emily Andrews, Andrew Griffith MP (invited), chaired by Lord David Willetts 15:30 Centre for Policy Studies, “How to fix London”: Gareth Bacon MP, Emma Best AM, Ben Hopkinson, Lawrence Newport, chaired by Hugo Gye 16:00 Nesta: Lord David Willetts, Tris Dyson, chaired by Isobel Scott-Barrett 16:00X2 Conservative Middle East Council: Professor Lin

A security officer who worked on Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch’s protection team had previously been reported to counter-terrorism police over “disturbing” videos and was allegedly caught bringing an eight-inch hunting knife onto a high-security Ministry of Defence site, according to an investigation by The Telegraph. The man, described in the report as a “fantasist,” was deployed as a security guard at the MoD site in June when colleagues raised the alarm after he