The next leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party, whoever they are, will face a dilemma. The general election revealed that the Party has become dangerously hollowed out – but any step toward reversing that will mean relinquishing some of the power the leadership has accrued since William Hague’s reforms gutted the institutional party in 1998.
It is one thing to complain about CCHQ myopically focusing all its resources on targets seats and the short-term interests of the leader du jour as an MP, after all, but quite another when it’s your chairman throwing everything the party has at your short-term interests.
Yet for all the potential dangers of democratising control of the central party machine, of which William wrote a few days ago, they pale in comparison to the risks involved in doing what several candidates are now pledged to do: giving associations control of candidates.
Both Robert Jenrick and Priti Patel have said they will overhaul candidate selection, restricting the Party’s role to maintaining a properly vetted central list from which associations may choose freely; James Cleverly and Mel Stride have also pledged, albeit in vaguer terms, to end the practice of parachuting favoured sons and daughters into safe seats.
It sounds good, right? Few people familiar with the recent operation of CCHQ can deny that its increasingly ham-fisted machinations on the candidates front have reached the point of being almost entirely counterproductive whilst not even managing to use its power to get a full slate of candidates selected in plenty of time. It would also be merely a return to the traditional freedom associations enjoyed before 1998.
The problem, however, is that those freedoms were exercised in a pre-social media, pre-Liberal Democrat world. Whatever criteria local associations used for choosing their candidate, there was still broadly a sense that they were selecting national legislators to focus on national issues; Parliament sat long into the night, and with no cameras or Facebook there was little dividend in MPs using up too much of its time with strictly local concerns.
It’s a very different world now, and the revealed preferences of too many associations are for a local candidate over everything else. In our analyses of the Tory intakes of 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2024, there was a very clear divergence between the pattern of candidates selected in safe seats, and those who won marginals.
Each had their strengths, representationally speaking: the Party has been pro-active about using its safer seats to promote racial diversity in the parliamentary party, for example, whereas new seats tended to sport more public sector workers.
But the problem goes beyond superficial questions of representation. In fact, it cuts to the heart of why this latest era of Conservative government was so ineffective.
Boris Johnson abandoned planning reform, even with a handsome majority, because even MPs with safe seats refused to place party policy (and the national interest) over local preferences; we failed to expand the prison estate in no small part because even the most hard-line law-and-order MP would perform a screeching u-turn if a jail was proposed in their constituency.
It may well be the case, per a wonderful quote I cannot currently locate, that the 20th-century Conservative Party was a network of six hundred social clubs that dabbled in politics. But they at least dabbled in national politics.
Given the very different political landscape of the 2020s, in which the Commons’ sitting hours have been slashed and MPs increasingly fill their days replicating the functions of councillors, any move to reduce central control over selections must reckon with the danger of the Party devolving into little more than a constellation of local anti-development militias, incapable and perhaps even uninterested in driving through a national programme.
As yet, no candidate seems to have openly addressed that problem, and the circumstances of a leadership contest militate against their so doing. But if we don’t have the honest debate now, it just makes it more likely that the leadership quietly u-turns on this stuff later.