Policy Research Media Morhamburn

Party conferences seem to be memorable as often for the things that happened away from the conference hall as in it. And, for some reason, the stories usually revolve around hotels.

Such as the hotel booking in Oban that never was because Tony Blair was coming to town and the police had decided that they needed a whole hotel for themselves and too bad if you had booked a room in it.

Or the very nice hotel a client from London once had booked for her for the SNP in Inverness which turned out to be in Forres.

So it should be no real surprise that the hotel I stayed in on the banks of the River Ness this weekend provided the most excitement.

About 2.10am on Saturday morning I was woken by a very loud noise from my bathroom where the cold tap on the bath had decided to disintegrate and the water was cascading out into the bath and it was filling very fast and about to flood everywhere. I managed to push down on the top of it long enough for the water to drain away a bit then made myself decent and tried to ring the reception but the phone was broken (top class hotel this) and so went out and tried the phone in the corridor which wasn’t working either but the night porter was wandering along the corridor so I dragged him into my bathroom to show him what was going on.

For some reason (perhaps the fact that I was in shock and it was about 2.20 am) I wasn’t able to verbalise a warning to him as he reached for the lever to switch the water from the tap to the shower – though my reflexes were good enough to step back before the tonnes of water were diverted through the shower and over him. He mumbled something about getting a tool kit and left. Water comes out pretty fast when you are on the third floor of a building and the tanks are three floors above.

The night porter reappeared and wasn’t able to do anything (I had sort of worked out from the wreckage of the top of the circa 1950 tap that it was past simply screwing back together) then abandoned me again and went to call for an all-night plumber. When he returned again I decided to go and ask for another room. I admit it – I left the battlefield while things were in full flow.

Even in my new room I didn’t sleep too well as every time anyone in any room anywhere near decided to flush their loo I woke convinced I was about to drown….

There is also a charming ritual in Inverness of sweeping the streets with some sort of gadget powered by an aircraft jet engine at 5am which nobody tells you about in the brochure.

I was regaling my plumbing sob story to a journalist former colleague of mine when he revealed that he too had fallen foul of Inverness hotel pipe work.

“I was in my bath this morning and the phone rang so I got out and answered it. “Are you having a bath, Sir?” Yes he said. “I thought so,” said the hotel reception person, “there’s water coming through the ceiling of the bar. They can’t have connected the overflow properly.”

The conference went well, by the way. The events that were meant to happen happened and the people who were supposed to meet were met. And the sun shone.

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