Grant Shapps is a former Defence Secretary, Transport Secretary, and Party Chairman and was MP for Welwyn Hatfield 2005-2024
You might think, after the thumping we got, that every Tory in the land would be cowering in a hole, muttering ‘never again’.
But not a bit of it. Conservative candidates are raring to go.
Certainly, it’s not been all rosy among candidates. Conservatives Together, the organisation I co-founded to support and represent Conservative candidates, asked our defeated candidates in the summer about what went wrong. They had plenty to say. During the campaign they had often felt isolated, disconnected from Number 10 and CCHQ, puzzled by decisions made at the centre, under-resourced and struggling to keep associations going.
“I feel like I’m mourning the loss of my party,” one told us. Another wrote to me that “the dismal national election campaign summed up where we were as a party both as a campaigning organisation and a political force.”
They committed their time, energy, personal resources and public reputations – and most of them got hammered, through no fault of their own.
And yet, it turns out, they’re a resilient bunch. They’re champing at the bit to go again.
To mark six months since Starmer entered Number 10, Conservatives Together publishes the results of a new survey showing that 89 per cent of our candidates want to run for Parliament again. Not just MPs wanting back in, but mostly a cohort of fresh faces who want to step up.
I believe they’re part of a surprising sense of optimism in the party.
A mega-poll last week showed there are huge wins to be had. And you might remember that a recurring media theme during our party conference this year was the question: “Why are they so… upbeat?” With commentators seemingly disappointed at the lack of party wallowing.
Perhaps we’re a party in denial, still in the early stages of the process of grieving our loss. But anyone who was expecting the onset of a further psychodrama has, so far, been left waiting.
Have we been humbled by the electorate? Yes – especially those of us who lost our jobs in the upheaval. Are we searching, debating and exploring for new policy ideas? Of course, as any party should. But broken? According to the Conservatives Together survey, clearly not.
That’s why I’m pleased to bring our survey results to the table, as another reason to get cracking in the new year. The team at Conservatives Together (CTog) surveyed all 529 unsuccessful candidates and MPs who stood in 2024, and asked them whether they hope to stand again.
Almost 300 replied, of whom 88.5 per cent said either ‘Yes, definitely’ (69.93 per cent) or ‘Leaning towards yes’ (18.58 per cent). Despite a bruising year in which they poured their hearts into local campaigns, the vast majority of unsuccessful candidates want to go again.
More than two-thirds of our respondents were new candidates rather than MPs seeking to return. A striking 81.25 per cent of PPCs (i.e. non-former MPs) have already decided to run again, nearly twice the figure among former MPs (43.18 per cent). That suggests a very healthy level of renewal, a majority of fresh faces combined with powerful parliamentary experience, among our next cohort of candidates.
That’s good news and we should probably go on to exploit it by selecting candidates early.
The evidence shows that early selection, especially from among a pool of experienced candidates, would be a strategic asset. After the 2005 election, when I first got into Parliament, I helped conduct a study of how ‘big swingers’ in our party had achieved outsized gains compared to the average. We found that the two biggest factors in achieving a bigger-than-average swing were 1) early selection and 2) candidate experience (ideally in the same seat).
A candidate with previous experience of running in the same seat got an extra 2.1 per cent swing. Remarkably, selection for a seat more than 50 months in advance of an election appears to provide the same ‘swing benefit’ as incumbency. Indeed, this benefit is a 1.65 per cent swing increase compared to those selected less than 20 months in advance. All those new Labour MPs should be very wary of early-selected Conservative opponents.
If those numbers sound a little marginal to bother with, consider two simple stats from the Conservatives Together launch report: that if just 1 per cent more of the registered electorate had supported us in July, we’d now be the largest party in a hung parliament. If 2 per cent more had done so, we would have won a majority. Suddenly those marginal gains from early candidate selection sound quite appealing.
Starmer’s majority is shallow and brittle. Early candidate selections in the right seats should be one of the most obvious marginal gains, in the style of Dave Brailsford’s Team Sky cycling squad.
In a few weeks, CTog will launch a programme to support and train candidates from pre-selection to pre-election, as well as some further thoughts on how data can be better used in engineering, what campaigning will look like in a world of technology including AI and where early selections should take place.
But for now, we’re highlighting and celebrating the huge enthusiasm among those 2024 candidates. These are people who believe in public service, and who have ideas and a vision for Britain’s future.
They want to fight again – and we, as a party, should help them.
You can view the survey results at www.ConservativesTogether.org tomorrow, Saturday 4th January. Conservatives Together was founded to support the community of Conservative parliamentary candidates. If you’re interested in standing (whether you’ve run before or not), you can still complete our survey on the website.
You might think, after the thumping we got, that every Tory in the land would be cowering in a hole, muttering ‘never again’.
But not a bit of it. Conservative candidates are raring to go.
Certainly, it’s not been all rosy among candidates. Conservatives Together, the organisation I co-founded to support and represent Conservative candidates, asked our defeated candidates in the summer about what went wrong. They had plenty to say. During the campaign they had often felt isolated, disconnected from Number 10 and CCHQ, puzzled by decisions made at the centre, under-resourced and struggling to keep associations going.
“I feel like I’m mourning the loss of my party,” one told us. Another wrote to me that “the dismal national election campaign summed up where we were as a party both as a campaigning organisation and a political force.”
They committed their time, energy, personal resources and public reputations – and most of them got hammered, through no fault of their own.
And yet, it turns out, they’re a resilient bunch. They’re champing at the bit to go again.
To mark six months since Starmer entered Number 10, Conservatives Together publishes the results of a new survey showing that 89 per cent of our candidates want to run for Parliament again. Not just MPs wanting back in, but mostly a cohort of fresh faces who want to step up.
I believe they’re part of a surprising sense of optimism in the party.
A mega-poll last week showed there are huge wins to be had. And you might remember that a recurring media theme during our party conference this year was the question: “Why are they so… upbeat?” With commentators seemingly disappointed at the lack of party wallowing.
Perhaps we’re a party in denial, still in the early stages of the process of grieving our loss. But anyone who was expecting the onset of a further psychodrama has, so far, been left waiting.
Have we been humbled by the electorate? Yes – especially those of us who lost our jobs in the upheaval. Are we searching, debating and exploring for new policy ideas? Of course, as any party should. But broken? According to the Conservatives Together survey, clearly not.
That’s why I’m pleased to bring our survey results to the table, as another reason to get cracking in the new year. The team at Conservatives Together (CTog) surveyed all 529 unsuccessful candidates and MPs who stood in 2024, and asked them whether they hope to stand again.
Almost 300 replied, of whom 88.5 per cent said either ‘Yes, definitely’ (69.93 per cent) or ‘Leaning towards yes’ (18.58 per cent). Despite a bruising year in which they poured their hearts into local campaigns, the vast majority of unsuccessful candidates want to go again.
More than two-thirds of our respondents were new candidates rather than MPs seeking to return. A striking 81.25 per cent of PPCs (i.e. non-former MPs) have already decided to run again, nearly twice the figure among former MPs (43.18 per cent). That suggests a very healthy level of renewal, a majority of fresh faces combined with powerful parliamentary experience, among our next cohort of candidates.
That’s good news and we should probably go on to exploit it by selecting candidates early.
The evidence shows that early selection, especially from among a pool of experienced candidates, would be a strategic asset. After the 2005 election, when I first got into Parliament, I helped conduct a study of how ‘big swingers’ in our party had achieved outsized gains compared to the average. We found that the two biggest factors in achieving a bigger-than-average swing were 1) early selection and 2) candidate experience (ideally in the same seat).
A candidate with previous experience of running in the same seat got an extra 2.1 per cent swing. Remarkably, selection for a seat more than 50 months in advance of an election appears to provide the same ‘swing benefit’ as incumbency. Indeed, this benefit is a 1.65 per cent swing increase compared to those selected less than 20 months in advance. All those new Labour MPs should be very wary of early-selected Conservative opponents.
If those numbers sound a little marginal to bother with, consider two simple stats from the Conservatives Together launch report: that if just 1 per cent more of the registered electorate had supported us in July, we’d now be the largest party in a hung parliament. If 2 per cent more had done so, we would have won a majority. Suddenly those marginal gains from early candidate selection sound quite appealing.
Starmer’s majority is shallow and brittle. Early candidate selections in the right seats should be one of the most obvious marginal gains, in the style of Dave Brailsford’s Team Sky cycling squad.
In a few weeks, CTog will launch a programme to support and train candidates from pre-selection to pre-election, as well as some further thoughts on how data can be better used in engineering, what campaigning will look like in a world of technology including AI and where early selections should take place.
But for now, we’re highlighting and celebrating the huge enthusiasm among those 2024 candidates. These are people who believe in public service, and who have ideas and a vision for Britain’s future.
They want to fight again – and we, as a party, should help them.
You can view the survey results at www.ConservativesTogether.org tomorrow, Saturday 4th January. Conservatives Together was founded to support the community of Conservative parliamentary candidates. If you’re interested in standing (whether you’ve run before or not), you can still complete our survey on the website.