New Statesman -- party conference winners
 

Bill Greenwell and Adrian Fry both have wins in the competition to propose new autumn activities to replace traditional party conferences. (The other two winners are M.E. Ault and Paul Wheeler, who takes the Tesco vouchers.) Adrian's winning entry describes a traveling ant farm sponsored by the Labour Party. Bill's suggests conferences featuring word games that bear a striking similarity to weekly magazine comps.

I hope both winners will post their entries here, or give me the green light to post them.

Here's Adrian's winner.

The Labour Party has announced its intention to replace its annual conference with a travelling ant farm. Ed Miliband believes that ants, with their collectivist social practices, clear division of labour, long-term commitment to major infrastructure projects and aptitude for problem solving, will help his party re-engage voters by acting as an example of what Britain could be like under a future Labour government. With its high population of co-operating workers, obedient drones and wingless infertile females, Ed’s mobile formicarium seeks to silence those critical of his lack of vision. The ant farm, to tour Labour heartlands and key marginals throughout next autumn, is no hastily contrived gimmick, having been in the Miliband family since 1979. “David always used to maintain it was his,” Ed revealed in a recent interview, “but it’s mine now.”

And here's Bill's:

The discipline of the word game is always very revealing. Every member of conference, of whatever party, will now be obliged, whether speaking in full conference or in smaller meetings, to play word association, or to start every sentence with the letter with which the previous speaker ended a sentence. Or they could compose platitudes in the manner of a well-known celebrity or novelist or poet or fictional character (maximum 150 words or 16 lines of poetry) and read out the results. This kind of pressurised task is likely to yield colossal wisdom about health, defence, education, the economy and other stuff, as well as giving onlookers a genuine insight into the kind of people they might or might not vote for. Cash prizes could be given to the most interesting, or, if need be, vouchers of some kind, perhaps to be spent in a local supermarket.

Ade's and Bill's-
Both very good!
I'd vote for those two
If I could.

Congratulations to both for managing to extract some fun from this unpromising competition!

Yes. These two are very good indeed.The rest of us must sharpen up.