Tommy Birch is a Behavioural Scientist, Coach and Leadership Advisor at House of Birch, a local councillor and CPF Area Leader for Hertfordshire.
The Conservative Party knows what kind of candidates it wants.
Earlier this year, Leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, and National Convention Chairman Julian Ellacott set out the framework: a new candidate selection process, led by Candidates Committee Chair Clare Hambro, built around four core qualities: communication, charisma, cleverness, and conservatism. In recent interviews, Kemi has added a fifth quality: conviction.
The five Cs are a serious framework, but a framework is only as good as the system built to deploy it. The question this article asks is not whether the Cs are right, they are. The question is whether the party understands them deeply enough, and is building consistently enough around them, to make them count. That is a question for every parliamentary candidate, every councillor, every association officer, and every activist, not just for CCHQ.
What kind of party are we being asked to be?
Kemi’s four original qualities solidified into five with good reason. Conviction is not a bolt-on. It is the thread that holds the others together and gives them direction over time. Together, the five Cs describe something more than a candidate specification, but a type of political character: one oriented toward genuine contribution rather than the performance of it.
Individual psychology distinguishes between two orientations in human behaviour: the pursuit of dominance, energising in the short term and brittle over time, and the pursuit of mastery, a grounded drive to contribute something of genuine worth anchored in coherent values.
The five Cs reflect the second orientation. They are attributes of substance that compound when expressed consistently at every level of the party. The Conservative Party has already articulated the qualities it wishes to see; the opportunity now is to build the leadership system that consistently develops them. The polling trajectory suggests the direction is right. When Kemi took over in November 2024, her net favourability was deeply negative across every tracker. By April 2026, More in Common recorded her as the most popular party leader in Britain. By July, Opinium put her ahead of Keir Starmer on the Best Prime Minister Question for the first time. Kemi is doing great, now the job is for us to do the same.
Cleverness
Cleverness is the capacity to engage seriously with complex problems and resist the temptation of simple answers. For parliamentary candidates and councillors alike, this means doing the analytical work before walking into the room, for example, understanding local planning data, knowing the housing delivery evidence, holding a position under scrutiny without retreating to slogans.
What distinguishes trusted representatives from forgettable ones is credibility: the accumulated evidence that this person has thought seriously about what they are saying. Cleverness expressed consistently in local settings is one of the most durable trust-building assets a Conservative can deploy. It cannot be faked over time.
Charisma: warmth before competence
In social psychology, charisma is defined as the sweet spot between warmth and competence. The warmth-competence model (Fiske et al., 2002) identifies two dimensions through which people evaluate others: whether someone is on your side, and whether they are capable of acting on it. These are assessed in that order – warmth first, competence second.
What that means in practice for a Conservative representative is worth sitting with. There is a growing cohort of aspiring candidates who are fluent in the performance of engagement: diligent at photographing their attendance at community events, active on social media, conspicuously visible around election cycles, and largely absent from the unglamorous work in between. They project competence, but warmth cannot be projected. Warmth is demonstrated through presence, consistency, and above all, the quality of attention paid to others when no one of consequence is watching.
Sports psychology captures the same distinction through task orientation versus ego orientation (Nicholls, 1984). Task-oriented performers define success by contribution while ego-oriented performers define success by how they are perceived. Voters feel the difference before they can name it, and trust is then rapidly eroded.
Communication: curiosity before clarity
The third C does not mean being good at speeches. It means taking Conservative ideas about free markets, small government, and personal responsibility, and making them land in the lived experience of the people you represent. But the precondition for that is something simpler and less often discussed: genuine curiosity about the people you are talking to.
Relationship psychology is consistent on what actually builds trust between people – the felt experience of being known. When someone demonstrates genuine curiosity about your life, your pressures, your neighbourhood, your concerns, it signals that you are worth understanding. That signal, repeated over time, is what converts a transactional interaction into a relationship. The councillor who knows which roads flood in winter, which families are navigating school admissions, and which businesses are struggling on the high street is not just better informed. They are more trusted, in the precise psychological sense: the community believes they are on their side.
Conviction: the courage to be consistent
When Kemi added conviction to the framework, she was explicit about what she was pushing back against. Britain, she said, does not need more people who can give speeches on subjects they barely understand for a few likes on social media. It needs legislators willing to make the big decisions on tax, borders, welfare, policing, energy, and defence. Conviction, in her framing, is the quality that separates someone genuinely prepared to govern from someone auditioning for a public profile.
Research on trust repair is unambiguous on this point: trust, once broken, is not rebuilt through better communication. It is rebuilt through repeated behavioural evidence that the gap between what someone says and what they do has closed. The Conservative Party is asking an electorate that watched its government say one thing and do another for fourteen years to believe it has changed. That case is made by behaviour, not assertion. For parliamentary candidates, it means being willing to say the same thing on a doorstep in a marginal seat as in a safe one. For councillors, it means voting consistently with stated values even when the local politics are inconvenient. These are not dramatic acts. They are the cumulative, unglamorous evidence from which durable political credibility is built.
Conservative: the C that holds the others together
The Conservative Party is the only party in the field offering a genuinely conservative prospectus: less government, more personal responsibility, economic freedom, and a state that does fewer things but does them well. That is a philosophical tradition with a two-hundred-year track record, not a campaign position. It creates a clear differentiator, but only if the party actually embodies what it claims to stand for. Kemi’s insistence that the party must not be used as a vehicle for personal ambition is a statement about that obligation. The fifth C is not a label. It is the standard of character that the other four must serve.
The team that wins from here
Julian Ellacott and Clare Hambro are doing the structural work at the centre. The five Cs are their brief to the whole party: living standards to be embodied by parliamentary candidates building their credibility, by councillors, by association officers developing the next generation, by activists on doorsteps between elections rather than only before them.
High-performing teams are built not around one exceptional player but around collective efficacy: the shared belief, reinforced through consistent behaviour, that the group as a whole can achieve its goal. The Conservative Party has that goal. What it needs is the collective discipline to express the same character, at every level, simultaneously.
Kemi is laying the foundation. The rest of us are the structure.
That is what a team sport looks like, and Britain needs us to play.
Tommy Birch is a Behavioural Scientist, Coach and Leadership Advisor at House of Birch, a local councillor and CPF Area Leader for Hertfordshire.
The Conservative Party knows what kind of candidates it wants.
Earlier this year, Leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, and National Convention Chairman Julian Ellacott set out the framework: a new candidate selection process, led by Candidates Committee Chair Clare Hambro, built around four core qualities: communication, charisma, cleverness, and conservatism. In recent interviews, Kemi has added a fifth quality: conviction.
The five Cs are a serious framework, but a framework is only as good as the system built to deploy it. The question this article asks is not whether the Cs are right, they are. The question is whether the party understands them deeply enough, and is building consistently enough around them, to make them count. That is a question for every parliamentary candidate, every councillor, every association officer, and every activist, not just for CCHQ.
What kind of party are we being asked to be?
Kemi’s four original qualities solidified into five with good reason. Conviction is not a bolt-on. It is the thread that holds the others together and gives them direction over time. Together, the five Cs describe something more than a candidate specification, but a type of political character: one oriented toward genuine contribution rather than the performance of it.
Individual psychology distinguishes between two orientations in human behaviour: the pursuit of dominance, energising in the short term and brittle over time, and the pursuit of mastery, a grounded drive to contribute something of genuine worth anchored in coherent values.
The five Cs reflect the second orientation. They are attributes of substance that compound when expressed consistently at every level of the party. The Conservative Party has already articulated the qualities it wishes to see; the opportunity now is to build the leadership system that consistently develops them. The polling trajectory suggests the direction is right. When Kemi took over in November 2024, her net favourability was deeply negative across every tracker. By April 2026, More in Common recorded her as the most popular party leader in Britain. By July, Opinium put her ahead of Keir Starmer on the Best Prime Minister Question for the first time. Kemi is doing great, now the job is for us to do the same.
Cleverness
Cleverness is the capacity to engage seriously with complex problems and resist the temptation of simple answers. For parliamentary candidates and councillors alike, this means doing the analytical work before walking into the room, for example, understanding local planning data, knowing the housing delivery evidence, holding a position under scrutiny without retreating to slogans.
What distinguishes trusted representatives from forgettable ones is credibility: the accumulated evidence that this person has thought seriously about what they are saying. Cleverness expressed consistently in local settings is one of the most durable trust-building assets a Conservative can deploy. It cannot be faked over time.
Charisma: warmth before competence
In social psychology, charisma is defined as the sweet spot between warmth and competence. The warmth-competence model (Fiske et al., 2002) identifies two dimensions through which people evaluate others: whether someone is on your side, and whether they are capable of acting on it. These are assessed in that order – warmth first, competence second.
What that means in practice for a Conservative representative is worth sitting with. There is a growing cohort of aspiring candidates who are fluent in the performance of engagement: diligent at photographing their attendance at community events, active on social media, conspicuously visible around election cycles, and largely absent from the unglamorous work in between. They project competence, but warmth cannot be projected. Warmth is demonstrated through presence, consistency, and above all, the quality of attention paid to others when no one of consequence is watching.
Sports psychology captures the same distinction through task orientation versus ego orientation (Nicholls, 1984). Task-oriented performers define success by contribution while ego-oriented performers define success by how they are perceived. Voters feel the difference before they can name it, and trust is then rapidly eroded.
Communication: curiosity before clarity
The third C does not mean being good at speeches. It means taking Conservative ideas about free markets, small government, and personal responsibility, and making them land in the lived experience of the people you represent. But the precondition for that is something simpler and less often discussed: genuine curiosity about the people you are talking to.
Relationship psychology is consistent on what actually builds trust between people – the felt experience of being known. When someone demonstrates genuine curiosity about your life, your pressures, your neighbourhood, your concerns, it signals that you are worth understanding. That signal, repeated over time, is what converts a transactional interaction into a relationship. The councillor who knows which roads flood in winter, which families are navigating school admissions, and which businesses are struggling on the high street is not just better informed. They are more trusted, in the precise psychological sense: the community believes they are on their side.
Conviction: the courage to be consistent
When Kemi added conviction to the framework, she was explicit about what she was pushing back against. Britain, she said, does not need more people who can give speeches on subjects they barely understand for a few likes on social media. It needs legislators willing to make the big decisions on tax, borders, welfare, policing, energy, and defence. Conviction, in her framing, is the quality that separates someone genuinely prepared to govern from someone auditioning for a public profile.
Research on trust repair is unambiguous on this point: trust, once broken, is not rebuilt through better communication. It is rebuilt through repeated behavioural evidence that the gap between what someone says and what they do has closed. The Conservative Party is asking an electorate that watched its government say one thing and do another for fourteen years to believe it has changed. That case is made by behaviour, not assertion. For parliamentary candidates, it means being willing to say the same thing on a doorstep in a marginal seat as in a safe one. For councillors, it means voting consistently with stated values even when the local politics are inconvenient. These are not dramatic acts. They are the cumulative, unglamorous evidence from which durable political credibility is built.
Conservative: the C that holds the others together
The Conservative Party is the only party in the field offering a genuinely conservative prospectus: less government, more personal responsibility, economic freedom, and a state that does fewer things but does them well. That is a philosophical tradition with a two-hundred-year track record, not a campaign position. It creates a clear differentiator, but only if the party actually embodies what it claims to stand for. Kemi’s insistence that the party must not be used as a vehicle for personal ambition is a statement about that obligation. The fifth C is not a label. It is the standard of character that the other four must serve.
The team that wins from here
Julian Ellacott and Clare Hambro are doing the structural work at the centre. The five Cs are their brief to the whole party: living standards to be embodied by parliamentary candidates building their credibility, by councillors, by association officers developing the next generation, by activists on doorsteps between elections rather than only before them.
High-performing teams are built not around one exceptional player but around collective efficacy: the shared belief, reinforced through consistent behaviour, that the group as a whole can achieve its goal. The Conservative Party has that goal. What it needs is the collective discipline to express the same character, at every level, simultaneously.
Kemi is laying the foundation. The rest of us are the structure.
That is what a team sport looks like, and Britain needs us to play.