Lee David Evans is the John Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute, Queen Mary, University of London.Â
Conservative leadership candidates only have one electorate for the next few weeks: MPs. In early September and then immediately after the party conference, the aspiring leaders will be voted upon only by their colleagues in Parliament. Party members, who make the final decision between the MPs’ top two choices, won’t have their say until October.
That hasn’t stopped the leadership candidates from focusing their guns on the grassroots, with Priti Patel the latest to make a pitch for their support. Writing for ConservativeHome, she argues that the party has a ‘democratic deficit’, with members’ voices often overlooked. Patel offers an eye-catching remedy: an elected Party Chairman.
This might sound like a token gesture, but in opposition the chairman is arguably the most important member of the Shadow Cabinet after the leader. They are the only ones with actual executive responsibilities rather than role-playing as a minister. With responsibilities including campaigning and fundraising, the party’s success at the next election depends in no small part on them.
With so much at stake, it’s worth asking how an elected chairman would work, starting with who could stand. In recent years, MPs, peers, and people in neither House of Parliament have served as chairman or co-chairman. Would this remain the case, or would the field be narrowed down to MPs, as in leadership elections? Doing so would provide some quality control against rogue candidates, but it would also restrict the quality available in a party with fewer MPs than at any time in its history.
Once it’s decided who can be a candidate for chairman, the party would need to design a method of electing them. Copying the current leadership election process, which delivers high engagement among members, would be expensive and distracting. But anything less could see only the most engaged participate in the process, enabling a small number of members to choose a Chairman that the entire party would have to live with.
And live with it for how long? The leadership of the party is open-ended; a leader can carry on until they decide to go, or are removed by their colleagues in the Cabinet or 1922 Committee. But the same accountability mechanisms (e.g. ‘no confidence’ votes) don’t and surely wouldn’t exist for the Chairman.
One option would be to keep chairmen in post for a fixed period, but it isn’t difficult to see how this could clash with uncertain parliamentary terms. What if, for example, a chairman was elected for a five-year term only for the general election to come three months after their time was up? An alternative would be to elect them for a Parliament, but with every defeated leader since Edward Heath resigning in the aftermath of an election loss, the chairman is often needed to provide stability and facilitate a leadership election in the early days of a new Parliament.
Let’s assume the party overcomes the who, how, and for how long questions. Even bigger issues arise once a chairman has been elected, thanks to the risk of competing mandates. It’s possible, for example, that a chairman turns out to be miserable at the job. If the leader sacks them, it would create tensions with the grassroots and arguably make a mockery of the entire election process.
But if the leader couldn’t sack them, they would be burdened with an incompetent chairman. This dilemma would be greatest when, as in three of the last seven leadership elections, members did not vote on the leader. In these cases, the chairman could lay claim to a mandate from the membership which the leader lacks.
Finally, a question that must always be asked in politics: what if they were on manoeuvres? It’s not implausible that someone who stood for election to be chairman may also have their eyes on the leadership. Central office could quickly become their power base for rivalling the leader – with control over candidate selection, media relations, and the targeting of resources. It would be a recipe for chaos.
Ultimately, everyone in the Conservative Party has a strong interest in having the best possible chairman. But nobody has a greater interest than the aspiring prime minister who leads the party. Members should have faith in them to pick the best person for the job.
