It was claimed last weekend that the Conservatives plan to impose by-election rules on selections for Parliamentary candidates in the New Year. And than over 40 MPs have written to Rishi Sunak opposing the scheme.
CCHQ’s version of events is that there is no such plan. “We wouldn’t want to move to by-elections rules at this stage in the electoral cycle, with the general election as much as a year away,” I’m told, “and we’re not so stupid as to push a scheme that we know would be opposed by a large number of MPs.”
Instead, CCHQ says that it wanted to expedite the process from three stages to two. The present procedure is that Associations with over 150 members are entitled, first, to discuss a long list with CCHQ; second, for its Executive to whittle down that long list to a short list, usually of three names and, third, for a general meeting of the whole Association to select its candidate from those three.
CCHQ argues that Labour has selected more Parliamentary candidates than the Conservatives have – so the Party needs to get a move on. There is also the matter of candidates for Mayoral and local elections. “We need more,” a CCHQ source says – citing a memo searching for new candidates, as reported recently by Michael Crick.
CCHQ says that it proposed dispensing with the second stage of the process, so that Associations would move straight from the sift, at which the long list would be drawn up, to the general meeting. Some of the protesting MPs – 45 in all, including Liz Truss and Suella Braverman – were apparently happy with this change, but wanted six candidates in each final rather than three.
At which point CCHQ pulled the plug on expedition, at least for the moment, concluding that the game of getting more candidates quickly wasn’t worth the candle of a wrangle with almost 50 Conservative MPs, including some very senior ones. Neither the Party Board nor its candidates’ committee has considered expedition.
This impasse is set against a background of dispute about Parliamentary selection that stretches back to David Cameron’s A-list of potential candidates, and which encompasses the present state of the Conservatives, the stance of Downing Street and CCHQ, the condition of the voluntary party – and the rights of members.
The latter are principally the right to select a Parliamentary candidate, if they turn up to a general meeting and the Association is of a certain size, and the right to vote for the leader of the Party in the final stage of a leadership election. That the list from which the Parliamentary candidate is chosen is originally compiled at the sift gives rise to complaints about CCHQ tilting the process for favoured candidates.
This is true as far as it goes – in that if CCHQ presents Association officers with a sift list to choose from, and CCHQ itself draws up the sift list from the wider candidates’ list, it follows that people on the candidates’ list it doesn’t want selected, at least for the constituency in question, don’t make the sift.
CCHQ’s case is that it is impractical for local Associations to select from several hundred CVs – and that it’s useful for the latter to see the data that CCHQ has on local demography before making their selections. Again, this is sensible as far as it goes. But there can be big differences, at least potentially, between the candidates that CCHQ wants and that local members want.
Consider William Atkinson’s most recent report for our coverage of Parliamentary selections: “Fifield selected in Mid Cheshire for being ‘well-established in the constituency’ “, the headline above the piece reads – showing this particular selection to be part of a recent pattern of local Associations choosing councillors as Parliamentary candidates. Charles Firfield has been a Cheshire councillor for over a decade.
What seems to be happening is that Associations – against a background of three Conservative leaders within a Parliament, dreadful recent Parliamentary by-elections and dire national poll ratings – are opting for safety first by selecting more local candidates that they know and trust. The long list of Parliamentary scandals may also contribute to an unwillingness to take risks.
CCHQ, however, has no interest in a list of Parliamentary that puts safety first. It wants a diversity of candidates – which immediately raises the question of what kind of diversity. One answer might be: more women as Parliamentary candidates in Conservative-held seats than are currently being selected.
Henry Hill’s assessments of recent Parliamentary intakes show that the proportion of women Conservative MPs rose from just under a quarter in the 2010 intake to over a third in 2015, fell back to one in five in 2017, and rose again to over a third in 2019. One assessment found that the proportion in recent selections is down to one in four. And women MPs are retiring at a faster rate than male ones.
One take is that the outcome of Parliamentary selections is none of CCHQ’s business; that local Assocations should therefore receive no input from it; that their Executives should select a shortlist from the entire candidates’ list, and that everything began to go wrong when the A-list was formed in the mid-2000s.
(In which context, it may be worth pointing out that the A-list, according to ConservativeHome’s files, included Liz Truss, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Esther McVey, Andrea Leadsom and Howard Flight – none of whom are obvious representatives of “the pseuds and poseurs of London’s chi-chi set”, to quote John Hayes’ description of the list at the time.)
If that’s your view, then having a Conservative Parliamentary Party which increasingly consists, on present trends, of male local councillors is either unproblematic, or else a price worth paying for local autonomy. If that isn’t your view, it follows that CCHQ will always have an interest in selections, even if restricted to drawing up an approved list of potential candidates and preparing lists for sifts.
The present impasse over expedition should be seen in the context of the condition of the Party as well as that of the Government. In 1990, it had over a million members. So roughly one in 40 British adults were Conservative members. This was a formidable base for Tory ideas and campaigning.
The Party has now reached the pathetic condition of refusing to give a membership figure at all because, in the words of the last Chairman to ConservativeHome, “it kind of creates media stories about short-term rises and falls in membership”. Labour’s membership is nothing to write home about either, according to Labour List.
Labour Party membership has fallen by almost 170,000 since 2018 and by approximately 19,000 since last summer, despite tens of thousands of members joining the party over the last year, new figures suggest,” the website reported last summer, adding that “the latest figure for Labour’s membership is 395,811 including 17,233 in arrears”.
The Conservative Parliamentary selection process offers few answers to these wider problems – though CCHQ should certainly drop the absurd secrecy which ensures that local Association members come to selection meetings not knowing the identity of the finalists.