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Andrew Brown, The Conservatives in Bournemouth: Revelations prove no more than a flash in the pan: Conference Sketch, The Independent, London, 11^th October 1990

IF MARY WHITEHOUSE had looked out of her window at lunchtime, she would have seen a fat man in a patterned sweater bouncing as he scampered down the hill towards the Hermitage Hotel, as though he were moving under lunar gravity. He came up behind a circle of photographers and giggling journalists. 'Hi, I'm Sean Gabb. Do you want a quote from me?'

And they did, for though only a failed former council candidate, he is also the secretary of Conservatives Against Sex Censorship, who had hired a young woman to lounge outside Mrs Whitehouse's fringe meeting. He had his reasons for this: 'Mrs Thatcher said that without choice there's no morality.'

Thelovelysimone, or possibly Thelovelysharon, as Mr Gabb called her - in any case, TLS for short - was more businesslike. Asked what she was doing, she replied: 'All I know is that I'm flashing, but I don't know when.' She was a former secretary, who now worked for an organisation called Electric Blue. The money was better, and there were spiritual compensations. 'It's better than sitting on your arse all day and doing office work,' she said.

When asked, TLS explained that she wasn't into politics. She did volunteer the opinion that 'Mrs Whitehouse is full of crap'.

Members of Conservatives Against Sex Censorship stood behind her in a ragged picket line as TLS prepared to perform. She handed her bag to a youth who was Essex Man to the tips of his pimples, and opened her coat formally to reveal an elaborate display of frothy white underwear. There was quite a lot of it: she was not unseasonably dressed.

Mr Gabb, pressed as to how he earned his living, said he was a writer of pamphlets in the cause of freedom: the rift among Tory intellectuals between marketeers and moralists runs right down to the bottom.

We had hoped that sex at lunchtime would whet the appetite for violence in the afternoon. Among the press corps here, there is a great nostalgia for a return to the traditional Dismemberment of the Home Secretary, formally known as the debate on law and order. Conducted in public, it had a wonderfully deterrent effect on aspiring politicians. Mrs Thatcher was known to be an enthusiastic supporter of the old method.

But this year, the punishment had been commuted to a long debate. The Home Secretary was shown the instruments of torture, but the inquisition never really got to work. The ideal speech in this debate would urge the death penalty as a solution to prison overcrowding. Instead, Mrs Pree Newbon, from Cambridgeshire, urged 'new ways of tackling young offenders, and directing them away from crime at an early age'. The party, which would normally prefer a late, high tackle, applauded her exposition of the complexities of crime.

The Home Secretary, however, brought from them a rapturous spasm of applause with a promise of 10 years in jail for prison mutineers; and again, when he attacked Labour's record on the Prevention of Terrorism Act. 'Decent Labour members must hang their heads in shame,' he said, which proves that a decent Labour member is one who hangs what he can. Home News Page 010