Definitely doesn’t.

I always find Tory conference difficult, and not just because I’m Labour: I have to go for work, and frankly, the chances of getting more than about twenty Tories to take an interest in anything about social policy are slim. This year, the usual difficulties were compounded by the fact that no platform without a leadership contender had a hope of an audience: one fringe, entitled “Ending child poverty: a Conservative priority?” got a decisive answer when the audience was counted - just one delegate who was neither staff nor a speaker attended.

Of course, the leadership contest dominated everything. I knew the week was going to be surreal when I was greeted at the door by a posse of telegenic young women in very tight t-shirts with the legend “Mine’s a DD” across their boobs: say what you will about our young Labour lovelies (and I do, often), but our women would never take part in such a demeaning stunt, even for a grateful glance or casual cuddle from a potential potentate. The Guardian photographer has evidence of this particular photo-op here.

David Davies also had by far the best freebies: I am now the proud (is that the right word?) owner of a David Davis wristband and car sticker. David Cameron pretty-boys (nice hair, shiny tie, shinier toes and odd bar-graph lapel sticker, intended to demonstrate something they didn’t quite understand themselves about his support amongst young people) could only give me a three-sided glossy leaflet and laser-printed copy of a supportive Guardian article - clearly a great strategy when you want to win Tory votes. Ken Clarke had his own buxom lovelies in powder-blue fleeces handing out beautifully-photographed pamphlets listing his supporters - unfortunately, as one delegate in the crowd spluttered, they bore an unfortunate resemblance to Cambridge boat-race groupies, “And I’m an Oxford man!” Interesting code, where Oxford means Eurosceptic.

By chance, I was on the floor for Ken Clarke’s speech: I was due to meet and brief our fringe chair without having checked proceedings. He came flying into the coffee bar and out again with me in tow to a corner of conference floor his friends had saved, so I had a grandstand view, if a slightly uncomfortable one, forever trying to ensure I wasn’t in the sights of one of the hundreds of cameramen looking for delegate colour. Ken looked terrible to me - but maybe that’s just what unspun looks like these days. And of course, he tied the neat ends of the logical impossibility at the heart of his speech together as only he could - if on the one hand, Gordon Brown is the same old tax and spend chancellor of old, how at the same time can Labour have pinched the Tories’ middle ground which Ken is pledged to reclaim? I don’t know, but then I wasn’t his intended audience, was I, and by their unexpected enthusiasm he must have managed it. It is hard, not revealing oneself to Tories (coming out in the rainbow sense is generally fine, but to come out as a wearer of red - unthinkable!)

Having said all that, Tory conference did provide for me the fringe highlight of the season. Undoubtedly the best fringe I have attended at any point in the last three weeks was Stonewall’s one, “A Modern Conservative Party?”. Being run by Stonewall, it obviously wasn’t about building a modern Conservative party at all, but was about the gays. Showing that high-profile speakers doesn’t always equal good fringeing, and proving my earlier assertion about the necessity of leadership contenders by exception, it boasted an unexpectedly interesting panel.

• Ben Summerskill, who went further in tailoring his argument to a party-political audience than I have ever heard a charity chief exec do before, and managed to be funny with it;
• Nick Boles, the losing PPC for Hove, who, - tieless, in a party where sartorial decisions can be interpreted as endorsements - ran through the contenders for the leadership in terms of their gay-friendliness;
• Eleanor Laing MP, who I respect greatly for the hard row she’s ploughing in her party despite, as she revealed in her speech, her membership of Liam Fox’s campaign team.

Andrew Pierce from the Times was a competent and heckling chair, and the audience was lively too. Highlights for me were Nick Boles’ defence of the four leading contenders’ votes to save Section 28, as a sacrifice necessary to keep them in the running for one-day leadership, and his assertion that Liam Fox was against abortion “with all that implies about his likely position on gay issues”, which drew a furious response from Eleanor, who claimed never to have discussed it with Liam, despite her claim of his promise to keep her in her current role, Shadow Women and Equality, if he were elected. (On a side note, as he today seems to have about 10 MPs and as a member of said charmed few there at the beginnning, you would think that she’d be promised something more high profile than that, really…)

There were, true to form at Tory conference, about forty men and five women in the room, and four of us were from NGOs, so I thought I’d ask about women. After all, a modern Conservative party should have more than 9% women MPs, you would have thought. And the room agreed, though they wouldn’t accept that they had to do anything about it, not even Eleanor Laing. She derided even Teresa May’s idea, which guarantees places for men as well as women, as patronising and insulted the Labour women elected through AWS. That was too much, even for the usually reserved Anne Weyman from fpa, who led the heckling from the floor. And all the gay Tories in the room were interested in were reserved places for gay men and disabled men and black men. But it was fun to ask, anyway.

The other fringe meeting I enjoyed was fpa’s one entitled “Teenage sex: what next?” The Tory health spokesman Simon Burns didn’t go off on one about abstinence, which the Tories perpetually seem on the edge of adopting as official policy. But two of the three speakers fluffed the question about section 28, with both the representative from the Royal College of Nursing and the MP appearing to believe that if you do an effective-enough selling job, the lifelong sexual orientation of impressionable young people can be inalterably affected.

But the highlight? Well, if you were at Oxford in the autumn of 2000, you’ll appreciate my reaction when the chair motioned to someone behind me to ask their question of the panel, and a voice piped up “Fiona Pinto, Pro-Life Alliance…” The woman I beat by a Stalinist 95% in a student election, the anti-choice zealot who became (allegedly) the muse of Paul Marsden’s poetry and whose 5% vote presaged a lifetime of lost deposits and getting arrested for brandishing pictures of a foetuses; isn’t it great to meet up with old friends at party conference?