John Moss is a Campaign Manager at College Green Group. In the last Parliament, he helped over 150 clients as they sought approval, selection and election as Conservative candidates. He is a past parliamentary candidate, GLA candidate and currently a Councillor and Association Chair in Chingford & Woodford Green.
Here, in the first of a three-part series, he discusses where the current approval and selection process failed. In the next edition, he will look at the approaches of other parties, and alternative routes the Conservatives could take. In the final edition, he will suggest how the process could be concluded in good time for a General Election in spring 2028.
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In 2017, 2019 and again in 2024, the Conservative Party went into a General Election without candidates selected for many seats. Chaos ensued and emergency approvals and rapid selections – even direct appointment of candidates – left members feeling disenfranchised and no doubt demotivated about getting involved with the campaign that followed. The quality of some MPs elected and their commitment to core, Conservative, values was also subsequently exposed as an issue.
Yet if we backtrack a little, there has been disgruntlement with the way that candidate selection has been handled by the Candidates’ Team at CCHQ through many electoral cycles. Whether that was David Cameron’s ‘A’ List or the propensity for Special Advisors and CCHQ preferred candidates to receive preferential treatment, especially in late selections.
It is worth reviewing what happened during the 2019-24 Parliament.
After every election the “Approved List” is deleted. Everyone who was on it, unless they were elected, is expected to go through an approval process again. This did not commence until late in 2020. This was because the process was reviewed and redesigned.
After a pilot at the end of 2020, those who had been on the list were invited to reapply early in 2021. Around 700 people went through this process, with applications made online via a new candidate portal. The digitalisation and professionalism of this revised process was a significant improvement as it made it much easier for all applicants to be taken through a similar journey.
Once applications had been assessed and passed, due diligence (online vetting and references from three referees) was undertaken, then candidates were invited for an in-person interview at CCHQ, with online psychometric and judgement tests taken at the same time.
Candidates were told of their fate just after the Party Conference in 2021 and successful candidates were awarded Development, Key or Comprehensive passes, sometimes with geographic restrictions.
New applicants were then invited to apply, and they went through a slightly longer process.
They used the same portal for applications and to submit their due diligence, with the interview conducted via Teams, alongside an online casework test. The in-person second stage added collaboration and public speaking/Q&A assessments alongside the psychometric and judgement tests.
Despite this shift to a more digital process, many people spent weeks if not months progressing through all stages.
Having worked with over 150 people going through the process, it was clearly professional and fair, but it lacked two things. A more thorough examination of Conservative values and beliefs, and speed.
Selection of candidates did not start in earnest until Spring 2023. This was complicated by the Boundary Review process, which only produced proposals which could be relied upon in November 2022. But there was then a significant delay in getting MPs to confirm whether they intended to stand again and, if they were displaced or their seats split between multiple constituencies, where they wanted to stand.
However, from then on, the desire was to move at pace, with the then Party Chairman setting a goal of 100 selections to be completed (excluding re-adopted MPs) by the 2023 Party Conference. This target was narrowly missed, but only if every seat selected was counted, including no-hope seats. Of those seats with retiring MPs or potential Conservative seats newly created by the review of boundaries, many remained vacant for weeks and months.
This doesn’t appear to have been the fault of local Associations.
They held their AGMs, set up their Executive Councils, chose their Sift Panels and Selection Committees and stood ready to issue notices of Special General Meetings. But the machinery of the Candidates Team ground slowly through the gears, admittedly distracted by multiple by-elections. When the election was called only 168 seats had completed their selections of almost 400 that needed candidates.
Many top targets remained vacant on the 22nd of May, and this was exacerbated when a number of MPs announced at that point, they would not seek re-election after all. Significant resources were needed to manage selections in these seats, with members rightly expecting to choose the candidates for winnable seats. The Party and local associations had to divert significant resources away from campaigning to run these selections, and many were not finalised until the week nominations closed.
It is arguable that the Party should never have been in the position of needing to conclude so many selections in such a short space of time. So how did we find ourselves in that position?
When those 168 seats were being selected, the process involved an application being submitted via the online portal, a paper sift being conducted by up to five local representatives, producing a long-list to be discussed at a meeting with the Candidates Team at CCHQ. Eight candidates were then interviewed by the local Selection Committee, before the final three candidates went before members attending a final hustings meeting.
That process seemed to take a long time to get through the first stage, but then on many occasions both the longlist interview and members hustings were concluded on the same day. This was felt to disadvantage those with weaker local connections and there were grumbles in higher ranks of the Party about how few women were being selected, despite clear guidance about achieving a balance in both the long and short-listed candidates. Stories grew of sift panels being leant on to favour certain candidates, or associations being guided away from others.
To be fair there were also examples of local associations appearing to ‘stitch up’ their panels to favour their own local favourites and in some cases few applicants applied, or local meetings were not quorate.
But with the calling of an election, that process ceased and ‘By-Election Rules’ took over.
This placed the decision as to which three names went before the members in the most competitive seats in the hands of the Chairman of the National Convention, the Chairman of the Candidates Committee and the Party Chairman. Local influence was removed entirely, and the impression was created that many well-regarded local candidates had been elbowed aside in favour of displaced MPs (including the then Party Chairman himself), Special Advisors and others favoured by the CCHQ machinery.
Needless to say, this wasn’t popular with the members but, looking across all selections, the process seemed unbalanced throughout. Too much power for Associations in the early stages, far too much power for CCHQ in the final throes. This was in part a result of the Boundary Review process, but it is absolutely clear that selections could have proceeded more rapidly than was achieved and had they done so that could have avoided a lot of acrimony.
In the second part of this series, I will look at the approval process in more detail and suggest how some of the issues identified here can be addressed from now on.
