Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020, and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking at a “meet the candidate” event in Shanklin, on the east coast of the Isle of Wight. Not that many people needed to meet their candidate. Joe Robertson already seemed to be known by half the Vectensian population. Brought up on the island, he chaired the local Conservative Future when I was the MEP, and was the leader of the Conservative group on the Council.
Every point on that CV will make him both more electable and, afterwards, more effective. Much the same could be said of the current MP for the whole island, Bob Seely, who will be the candidate in West Wight at the next election. True, Bob has had a more varied life, serving in the Armed Forces and travelling widely, but his family roots on the island go back far enough even to impress that exacting population.
The Isle of Wight has an unusually pronounced sense of local identity, but Conservative associations around the country are doing the same thing. After the first dozen selections, this website noted that activists were picking hyper-local candidates. As far as I can make out, that tendency has accelerated since.
Of the 38 candidates so far selected, 26 by my count are either local councillors or long-standing members of their Association. Most of the constituencies that look likely to return a Tory have opted for proven local champions: Cllr Lewis Cocking in Broxbourne, Cllr John Cope in Esher, Cllr Rebecca Paul in Reigate, Cllr Pauline Jorgensen in Earley and Woodleigh, and so on.
The next Parliament may be the most local ever, in the sense of having the highest proportion of MPs who had already been living in their constituencies before they were elected.
More than most countries, Britain used to let talented people stand in constituencies with which they have no connection. Winston Churchill, not untypically, sat for Oldham, Dundee, Epping, and Woodford.
We sometimes imagine that there was a time when constituencies were represented by local landowners, deeply attached to their soil, but I’m not sure there ever was. To take an Elizabethan example, Francis Bacon (the hero of Jesse Norman’s excellent novel) sat variously for Bossiney in Cornwall, Melcombe in Dorset, Taunton, Liverpool, Middlesex, Ipswich, and Cambridge University.
Now having rooted MPs is a good thing. It gives each part of the country its own accent in Parliament, as it were. It means that MPs are less likely to be career politicians and more likely to be local notables.
But it is possible to have too much of a good thing. You wouldn’t compose your cricket XI entirely of left-handed spin bowlers, however individually talented. The House of Commons needs its councillors, its local grandees, even its backwoodsmen. But it also needs a few former spads who know their way around Whitehall.
That is never a popular argument to make. The assertion that there are “too many professional politicians” is almost guaranteed to get you a round of applause – although, if you think about it, no-one is a professional politician until they have been elected, at which point everyone is.
Still, Parliament needs its specialists – meaning, in this context, people who are sufficiently on top of their briefs to impose themselves on the groupthink of their civil servants. It needs genuine diversity; diversity, that is, of outlook and professional background rather than just sex and skin-colour.
Obviously, not everyone selected has been a district councillor. A few high-flyers of the old kind, such as Rupert Harrison in Bicester and Katy Lam in the Weald of Kent, have made it. But the proportions have shifted.
The simplest explanation is that the size of the selectorate has declined as party membership has dwindled. If you wanted to be selected in a safe seat before the 2005 or 2010 elections, you might address a final meeting of 250 members. Today, it is rare to get more than 50 people, unless they were explicitly signed up to vote for someone.
I don’t mean to suggest any impropriety. There is nothing wrong with candidates asking their friends to put the selection date in their diaries. On the contrary, they’d be fools not to. The difference is that, nowadays, those friends can easily account for more than half of all present, making the rival candidates’ speeches redundant.
Still, there is a danger. Ask a councillor why he or she stood in the first place and, as often as not, you’ll get the answer “To stop X”. A national legislature that contains a goodly number of former councillors will be more balanced and knowledgeable. A national legislature that contains a majority of former councillors will stop things being built – houses, reservoirs, nuclear power stations, you name it. If you doubt me, look at the voting record of Liberal Democrat MPs.
I have argued here many times for a radical devolution of power. Towns and counties should determine many, perhaps most, of the things we currently leave to MPs. Equally, though, MPs should be chiefly interested in the issues that cannot be decentralised: defence, immigration, elements of taxation.
Is there any way to bring the numbers into balance? The surest method would be open primaries, with every registered voter sent a ballot. Sadly, full open primaries were discredited when their first and most public beneficiary, Sarah Wollaston, went off at the deep end, beginning the EU referendum as a Leaver, and ending by joining Change UK and then the Lib Dems. Few recall that the same method was used to pick the excellent Caroline Dinenage – and served, in the process, to give her a huge boost as the candidate.
So we are left with what economists call the paradox of rationality. Individually, it may make sense for a constituency to pick a known local candidate. But collectively, the party needs some constituencies to think outside the box, so as to make itself collectively more electable. Tricky, really.