Conference post-script: non-story of the week

I usually find when attending a party conference that there seems to be a remarkable gulf between the conference which the people who are physically there think they are attending and the one which is reported by the media.

But even by this standard there was a big gulf today between the conference at which I heard a large number of tributes from the Prime Minister down to the work of the police, and an allegation which I was astonished to read in the Independent and their "I" spin-off newspaper today that because David Cameron didn't mention the police in his closing speech he obviously doesn't care about them.

As I had heard the Prime Minister, Police minister Damian Green, Homes secretary Theresa May, and others make exactly the sort of tribute to the work of the police which this Independent diary entry complains that he didn't make, I nearly fell off my chair when I read it.

On thinking about this further, the Prime Minister's tribute to the police was made at one of the conference sessions or meetings to which the press were not invited, specifically at a session about the police and crime commissioner elections on November 15th.

However the speeches by the police minister and the home secretary in which they paid tribute to the work of the police were delivered in the main hall and in the presence of TV cameras and journalists. So to suggest that the police were not given any recognition at the conference was really quite misleading. Perhaps it's time the "Independent" changed it's name to "The Leftie."

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