I STILL don’t know what possessed me. Call it anthropological curiosity. In September 2003, when I was 17 years of age, I went to a Tory Party conference. The character responsible for this journey into the strange was a school contemporary and early political sparring partner. Let’s call him Bob. Bob took Harry Enfield’s Tory Boy as a life model rather than satire. I expect he’s a better man now.

Pious, reactionary, fogeyish, debating club – part of Bob enjoyed his outsider status in Glasgow and hammed it up egregiously. Most kids are keen – too keen – to avoid a kick up the gusset by standing out from their contemporaries. Bob, by contrast, marched to school each morning wielding a thunderous black leather briefcase. Young William Hague, reincarnated. Insufferable, really.

But he was not unkindly treated for all that. And despite our differences, we mostly got on. I have Briefcase Bob to thank for leaving the window ajar into the weird and wonderful world of what Conservatives really say to one another when they think nobody else is listening. A sub-genre of anthropology, where the tribe you visit are the ones wearing the pith helmets and affecting the Edwardian accents.

So to London we went. The topic of this two-day Tory hate-in was “compassionate conservatism”. And I tried not to look – or sound – too conspicuous in the crowd of party supporters mobilised to contemplate this once-fashionable bit of political badinage.

In the early 2000s, the rhetoric of “compassionate conservatism” was popularised in the United States by President George W Bush, before he discovered that the steel-tipped language of evil, terror and war was much more psychologically gratifying. You’ll now find it filed away, alongside all the other dead slogans tucked up in the archives of Conservative Central Office, between John Major’s “back to basics” and Theresa May’s brief pre-occupation with the “just about managing”.

In September 2003, Iain Duncan Smith was limping on as Tory leader with the quietly plaintive expression of a man who has come to terms with his haemorrhoids.

The year before, Theresa May had scandalised her party’s activists. “Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies,” she said, describing the Tories as “the nasty party”. So compassionate conservatism it was to be. Duncan-Smith told the conference that “unless Conservatives can show that we will govern for the whole nation, we will neither win nor deserve to. That is why our fair deal is for everyone. No one held back. No one left behind.” Plus ça change. Just over a month later, the Tories had tossed the quiet man and his “caring party” overboard.

A decade and a half on, the parallels with this week’s headlines are striking. Going into their conference this Sunday, the Tories are full of the same old anxieties that their social and economic agenda – the tone of their political voice as Brexit unravels – isn’t finding its mark with the wider public. Or as one right-wing broadsheet put it this week, “the terrifying truth is that Middle England is falling for Corbynomics”.

Back in 2003, Melanie Phillips proudly hoisted the flag for nastiness, denouncing the concept of compassionate conservatism as empty schlock, demanding a return to a tax-cutting, immigration lowering, law and order agenda.

Then a Times journalist, Michael Gove wibbled politely. The Peter Mannions of the shadow cabinet tried to feign enthusiasm for this Tory iteration of the kinder, gentler politics.

The party members seemed largely nonplussed by the ideas being batted around about interesting ways Tories might stop being bastards. They became considerably more animated by the opportunities to press the flesh with various MPs.

There were ancient duffers in mustard tweeds and slick young things dressed like Mormons and born to clip along after minor Tory ministers in Whitehall before metastasising into minor Tory ministers themselves.

There was one kid – a Ted Cruz type – who looked like an unsuccessful National Front candidate in a Dorking by-election in his Union Jack tie, socks and lapel stud. I did my best to avoid being impolite or blowing my atom-thin cover, but when one “one-nation” Tory told me he thought “everywhere north of Manchester is basically the same” – well, my serenity didn’t hold.

It was an early lesson that party activists are imperfect representatives – not only of wider society – but of most of their voters. During conference season, this fact is mercilessly transmitted across the airwaves.

This week’s Labour conference brought us a medley of over-excited activists, determined to do the right-wing media’s work for them. There was the glam rock Unionist claiming he set his “alarm clock an hour earlier than I need to”, just so he could hate Margaret Thatcher “for an hour longer”.

And the primary teacher who claimed one upshot of Labour education policy would not only be the emptying of prisons, but the emptying of the world of Tories, “because we’ll have brought up our kids properly’’.

We all can say daft things in the heat of the moment. But michty. This is halfwit stuff when the prospect of returning Jeremy Corbyn to Downing Street demands the votes of folk who have – and may again – cast a vote for Theresa May’s party. But now it is the Conservative Party’s turn to get its bozos out.

This morning, the Tories will begin descending on Birmingham for their live-action vivisection. Francis Urquhart called this one pat. “A party conference can be many things: a show of confidence, an agonising reappraisal, or a series of auditions by pretenders to the throne, while the lost leader withers before our very eyes.”

This year’s conference seems likely to be an exercise in all three, as the Prime Minister attempts to shore up her leaky position, maintain some semblance of party unity on the contours of Brexit, while ambitious Sir Politic Would-Bes like Boris Johnson try to spear the bottom out of her bucket.

It’s just a shame that the European medicines agency is off to Amsterdam as a result of Brexit. Theresa May might be glad of a swig of tramadol by the time conference is through.

Labour leaves Liverpool this week, trailing bloody footprints from their ongoing civil war. Scottish Labour delegates taking the long road north return in particularly rough nick.

More lines on Brexit than you could count, sectarian gags from senior party figures on the platform, Corbyn swithering on a second independence referendum days before Richard Leonard announces that Labour are going to “categorically” state their opposition to holding one in their next manifesto.

All this was crowned by the untimely revelation that the party cut loose Kezia Dugdale’s legal briefs in the Wings Over Scotland defamation case – allegedly as a result of internal political machinations.

Dugdale’s allies have been booting up in her defence. Edinburgh South MP Ian Murray has described Leonard as a “nodding dog to Corbyn,” asking “how can the public possibly believe the promises that the party makes to the public if they can’t fulfil a promise to one of their most loyal and hard-working members?” How indeed.

The media can pathologise conflict within political parties, reframing every debate as damaging division.

It is another one of those irregular political verbs. We have a vibrant internal democracy. You are hopelessly divided. They are Liberal Democrats. But even by Scottish Labour’s standards, this is quite a way to leave a party conference.

Indiscipline, indiscretion and public recrimination: all the kinds of friendly words you associate with a party on the up. Labour’s only solace is this: there’s every chance this week’s Tory gathering will be uglier still.