Andrew Morrison is a Scottish Conservative and Unionist Councillor in East Renfrewshire. He is also the Chairman of the Scottish Conservative Councillors Association.
It may be the rare occurrence that a Conservative takes pen to paper calling for electoral reform, but we are in unprecedented times which means everything must be on the table.
Before one gets carried away, I should add that I am merely speaking of reform in terms of that vital duty that we members seem to be asked to discharge with growing recurrence these days – the party leadership election.
On the last occasion members were balloted, neither of the candidates who made it through to the final two were able to cut the mustard. This is despite the breadth of promise and talent presented to MPs during their five rounds of voting, with popular candidates such as Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt being taken out of the hands of the membership.
In nine opinion polls conducted throughout July 2022 – three of which were conducted by and published here on ConservativeHome – Liz Truss did not win a single poll. Penny Mordaunt won three and Kemi Badenoch won two. This is yet another illustration of MPs being out of touch with the grassroots members.
Had either or both of these two been presented to the membership, history may well have played out very differently.
The margins were such that the Parliamentary party had split themselves almost perfectly in three – 105 for Mordaunt, 113 for Truss, and 137 for Sunak – which is not a ringing endorsement of the final two we are expected to vote on.
A two-way contest may work where MPs are voting in good faith for the two candidates who would constitute the best genuine choice for members. There have however been sustained concerns over many years that the system is being ‘gamed’ by MPs. This constitutes tactical voting coordinated by supporters of the frontrunner in the knockout stages where votes are loaned to a weaker opponent to remove a stronger opponent from the members’ ballot.
Take 2001 for instance when it is claimed supporters of Iain Duncan Smith tactically voted for Ken Clarke to ensure he did not have to face Michael Portillo in the membership vote, which would have been a much tighter contest.
In more recent years, there were further claims of tactical voting by MPs supporting Boris Johnson who allegedly ‘lent’ support to Jeremy Hunt in the 2019 contest, to knock out Michael Gove ahead of the members’ ballot. Alan Duncan, who supported Mr Hunt, at the time, told Channel 4 News: “There’s talk of one team using proxies designed for their candidate being used for another to boost them.”
Compare and contrast this to leadership elections held by the Scottish party, where the single transferable vote system allowed members to choose from four excellent candidates in the 2011 election.
Ruth Davidson took a respectable 40 per cent of first preferences cast in the first count, winning 55 per cent of the vote over her nearest rival’s 45 per cent in a result that would retain constitutional significance for the wider United Kingdom a few years later.
This was despite the significant number of the Scottish Parliamentary party backing her primary opponent, Murdo Fraser. The membership spoke, and history vindicates their decision and not that of the parliamentary group.
It is sometimes supposed that we Scots enjoy thriftiness, so members north of the border will be pleased with the prospect of ‘two for the price of one’ this year for the Scottish party is also going through a leadership election.
The manner this will be conducted is a model that should be replicated across the UK Party. I’ll explain why.
So far there are several serious candidates considering standing in the Scottish contest, all of whom would bring credible campaigns and ideas to the fore. Rules for this contest are yet to be promulgated but presuming they do not deviate substantially from those used previously, members in Scotland will have a range of talent to give as many or as few preferences to as they wish.
Members must not remain bystanders until the very last stage once again. Particularly not when future visions of how we rebuild ourselves as a credible alternative government are numerous. How can such a broad debate of our current predicament and future solutions be meaningfully reduced to a polarised contest between two individuals?
Another factor is the fact the MP group is now a third of the size it was before the election. If 358 MPs were not able to accurately represent the views of the wider grassroots party, are we seriously saying 121 of them will do a better job?
Many of those MPs are members returning fresh from the instability of recent years. The best way to make a clean break with the past is to let MPs nominate candidates for leadership and then pass it over to us to get on with the rest of it.
If that means using single transferrable vote to rank as many or as few candidates out of a selection of four or perhaps five, then so be it.
Membership of the party has been in decline for some time, and if we are serious about building a stronger relationship between the hierarchy and the grassroots, it is time to give us greater trust and say over the leadership election process. After all, in recent years, it is our instincts which have been correct.
The next leader will be our sixth in the past decade so whomever we choose needs to be fit for the coming decade and beyond to bring the stability, credibility, and solutions we need to get back to where we must be – challenging Labour, fighting for Britain, and leaving no doubt in the minds of right-of-centre Brits as to who truly represents them, to win once again.
