End of the cheer show: Blackpool bows out

As the Tories leave Blackpool, they take with them a little bit of history. Neither of the two main parties plan to return for their annual conference. Paul Vallely reports on the end of a political era

For more than half a century, Blackpool has been the setting for some of the nation's highest political drama. The rise of the post-war welfare state, the old-style anointings of high Tory leaders, the arrival of the Wilsonian white heat of technology, Labour's decline into the clutches of the IMF, the rise of Thatcherism, John Major's ill-fated back-to-basics campaign and the advent of New Labour – all these have been played out against the background of this dilapidated seaside town.

Here, grit and glamour combined in equal political measure. The north/south divide is plainly apparent from the cheapness of the accommodation compared with Brighton or Bournemouth. More Tories always applied to attend when the conference was held in the South, despite the fact that Robert's Oyster Bar always let delegates bring in their own champagne. But it was there, too, in Blackpool's inescapable sense of irony.

The Winter Gardens stage which housed political luminaries by day was home to the likes of Ken Dodd in the evenings. Local confectioners would produce sticks of rock with Michael Howard lettered throughout. (David Cameron's aides decided not to follow that example, claiming the notion was not "modern" enough.) Then there were McGill style saucy seaside postcards, with a callow youth asking his buxom girlfriend to marry him and receiving the reply: "Not likely – no girl wants Gordon Brown getting his hands on her tax credits!" Blackpool was a locale which prevented the denizens of British political life from taking themselves too seriously.

Such correctives are no longer needed. Party conferences today are no longer the forum for red-blooded political debate. They have become mere photo-opportunities, platforms for posturing and party political broadcasting. At the Labour conference in 2002, the film star Kevin Spacey got a standing ovation for just walking into the Winter Gardens.

Blackpool was formed in another era. This entertainment extravaganza by the sea, with its half-sized pastiche of the Eiffel Tower, sprang up to offer snatched diversion to the workers of the industrial north. Today their descendants toil in service industries and holiday in the Mediterranean.

Now, too, the politicians are off, to snazzy new conference centres – with all their wi-fi and chrome – in Manchester and Birmingham. And they didn't even leave behind a super-casino to take their place.