ConservativeHome’s Editor, Giles Dilnot sat down with the interim Party Chairman Richard Fuller MP, ahead of the party Conference in Birmingham. Richard is in post until November 2nd, when a new leader is announced. Giles started by asking why, in such difficult times for the Conservative Party, after such an election defeat, he’d agreed to do the job…
RICHARD FULLER: Well, I think I’ll accept the premise.
Media trainers always say do not to accept the premise of the question, but I think it is fair to say this is a difficult time for the Conservative Party. It is the worst election defeat that we’ve had for as long as… anyone can remember, really.
It was a defeat we brought upon ourselves.
It wasn’t defeat because of a love of alternatives, and it wasn’t a defeat brought about by the thousands of Conservative councillors and activists or the 100,000 more party members.
It was brought along by the parliamentary party in its inability to deliver on what the public were wanting us to do …and to look like we were not united. And this conference is the first time that the members have the chance to meet the representatives of parliamentary party, and I am the Party Chairman, I’m going to go out first, but also to meet the new leaders. So, yeah, it is difficult and there have been some difficult decisions over the last few weeks:
Obviously, we’ve had to do some downsizing at party headquarters, CCHQ. That’s quite natural, that happens after an election. But I’ve also spent a long time over the summer talking to former MPs who lost their seat, that is an experience I know, I’ve been through it myself….it can be tough not just for yourself, but you also feel for your staff who lose their jobs, and you feel for your constituents and lots of us would have had campaigns running when we lost the seats that were important to local people. And I’ve also been talking to members because the other thing is, the interesting thing talking to members is they’ve got lots of good ideas. So, it’s a mixed bag and… what made me take it on?
I like a challenge.
GD: Well, it is a challenge, and I know many of those who lost seats and those who campaigned very hard. How much have you had to do a little bit of that arm around the party and go, “I’m here to hear it”?
RICHARD FULLER: A lot.
I opened up my chairman email accounts. So, it would accept emails from members, which was been, perhaps a little novel. But the reason for that was that I wanted to hear what party members had to say and I’m going through, I’m going through slowly, but I’m going through them all and reading them all myself. I think it’s important to do that, an important time to do that.
I remember when Dominic Cummings did the ‘Barnard Castle’ in the middle of Covid, I remember all these waves of emails coming to me as a constituency MP. And I want to read them because I knew you would be sharing what they really …raw …felt about it and this is a bit like the experience for our party members, they wanted us to know what they had to say.
So, I think it’s important that as Party Chairman, that I read all of those thoughts and, yeah, try and help former MPs… you’ve got to remember, there are only 121 Conservative MPs. There is no love for Labour, but we only ended up with 121. We are the only effective opposition in Parliament: The Liberal Democrats aren’t doing that Reform talk a lot, don’t do much…. The Conservative parliamentary party has got to provide that response.
But we have lots of former MPs, very good people and some great candidates out there who would still like to play a role in their local communities doing some of those campaigns that they were doing when they were an MP, being, actually being able to speak up for Conservative values in their area with a lot of knowledge of running ministerial departments in some cases.
So, we want to draw those people, bring the talents into the party. And that’s one of the things that I will be doing after the conference, which is making sure that in each of the regions of the country we have a group of people who are accessible to local associations to help with local campaigning, local media helping with fundraising and membership.
GD Lots of the (leadership) candidates have already signalled; the structures, the processes, even the personnel of the party will have to change. You’re working with lots of them, at the moment….That must be hard, as well, for them and for you, but do you also hear there is a degree of disappointment and it’s not working, the way it is?
RICHARD FULLER:
Yeah, I think people are talking about the party, the professional party in that instance, although there are people that talk about the voluntary party too: number of volunteers, the structure of associations, and that’s part of the review process, perhaps we could talk a bit more about that.
But, you know, it’s always good to hear opinions and viewpoints from leadership candidates…of course only one is going to be leader… but all viewpoints are a useful to have.
One of the benefits I have coming in as Chairman now is in my pre-political life, I was a consultant, I restructured a national phone company. I rescued an airline bankruptcy and wrote the business plan to recover… So I’m all ears for ideas but I think for all for all those ideas that the leadership candidates have, I will want to test their ideas against the same metrics I test other people’s ideas to find out what ultimately is the most sensible step for reform to create or rebuild the party as the election winning force but with an eye on the next election and future elections.
So that means more modern techniques, means broadening our appeal to groups who share our values but all part of the active base of the Conservative Party.
It means opening up to new generations of Conservatives to try to challenge, that age issue that in the last election was so significant for us. So, yeah, that’s… we need a professional organisation that feels comfortable with the techniques to win campaigns that are ahead of us, but also a professional campaign that can support the voluntary party reconnecting with the country we want to represent.
GD: Let’s have a chat about the review. I guess there’s a process of…. we need to go through a process of reviewing ….and then you get people that come up and go ‘I don’t need a review to tell me what happened’.
RICHARD FULLER:
We do. We do need a review.
And first of all, the right way to start review is to look at the other reviews we’ve done and see, well, in those reviews….and we had one by Lord Feldman in 2015, we had one by Eric Pickles, Lord Pickles, in 2017. So, to look at what was recommended there and how we implemented them: did we or did we not and are there good reasons why we didn’t.
So, part of that is input into the review.
Part of it is the input we’ve got speaking to former colleagues, people doing the election, their thoughts of what happened in terms of the national campaign messaging, what was happening in terms of local support, what was happening in terms of asking candidates to move their campaigns from A to B, what was happening on the selection of candidates.
(We) got lots of feedback, as you might imagine, on all those topics. So that will feed into the review and then getting some external viewpoints into the review: we’ve already got perspectives from the Association of Conservative Peers – excellent report, they call it Project Phoenix.
I’ve read it. I’ve spoken to members of the House of Lords to get their viewpoints from it …that’ll feed into the review.
But we need ultimately to have a group that’s going to synthesise all that, reach out for more perspectives, and then decide on all the various recommendations they make; which ones make sense, and then to oversee implementation.
One of the concerns I have sometimes with reviews is we ask people to come together, provide a review, and then …they all go away… and nothing gets done.
So, with this review… I’m going to ask …. I want them stay for a while to oversee, to have authority, for a period of time, so they can oversee the implementation of recommendations that we have. And so, I’m pulling together a team to do that, and we’ll be announcing that later on Sunday.
GD: What are you going to be telling people? What message do you want to really land with them? We’ve just described how people might be in a certain mood as they arrive.
RICHARD FULLER:
Well, that’s important… the mood, that people are in where they arrive.
Remember, it’s the first time the party members will have had direct contact with the parliamentary party, which having read through a lot of emails, the members say.. they’re saying: it’s on you guys. Right. So ….and I’m the Party Chairman, so I’m going to be that person. And so, it is important to recognise….for me to recognise that strength of feeling.
And I don’t think….you know, some might criticise this as being ‘self-indulgent navel gazing’…I personally don’t think that is respectful to people. We are a proud political party… probably the most successful political force in the United Kingdom, probably the most successful political force anywhere else: This has been a terrible blow.
And we know it’s just one part of the party or a large one part of the party that brought it upon us.
Now, many people feel it’s recoverable. We know that some voters are really getting voters remorse, buyer’s remorse for the election. So, the first thing I think is to take that level of concern of members seriously and address some of the points that they have. So, a large part of what I say, will be doing that.
The other is to draw on some of the positive experiences.
So, there are some ‘walk on parts’ …if you like… that will happen. And these come from some of these conversations…. so the candidate who stood for Birmingham Ladywood which is where the conference centre….where the conference is being held, is in Birmingham Ladywood constituency….She was on one of the feedback calls and she was great, had really positive stories and …so I asked her to come and say a few words.
And then there was… on another call…there are a couple of candidates from up in the Northwest who stood… one in a seat that I think we would define as ‘challenging’ at the best of times and another who was in a marginal seat. And when they were talking on the call, they talked about how they worked together and how they found that a rewarding experience. So, I want them to come and share some of that.
So yes, there were problems in the campaign.. how it was run… but also as is always the case, the general election is also 650 individual battles and there are some positive outcomes from that.
So, a lot of speech is going to be about that and it’s a bit about the review and letting the Conference hear a bit more about the review.
And then the third is some important themes of change that I feel that in my role as interim Chairman until November 2nd, I want us to make progress on…. so that when the new leader comes in on the 2nd of November, he or she has some ideas on some of the things that we know we need to do… and we think are important.
So, for example, it’s important for the messages we got was that voters, members felt that we had lost sight of our core conservative values. Now, we hadn’t…but we were buffeted by events.
So, what was it …so… initially we’re back to the great deficit that Labour left in 2010 and the Coalition, which morphed things a bit had to be two parties. Then we had the Brexit issue, which divided on another set issues, and then we had Covid that came in… and then the costs, paying back the costs of Covid…. All of those events and all of that time the public were saying, we want the Conservatives to run, we want the Conservatives to run but that has shaken peoples clear sighting of conservative values, those small ‘c’ values.
So, we need to reassert that.
We know that in the university campuses we are not engaged fully enough in the battle of ideas. We are not winning the battle of ideas with the left.
We know we have a great set of think tanks out there that have conservative values. We haven’t harnessed that as a party, and we need to build up our research department.
So, in the great area of our core values and developing themes around that…that’s a huge piece of work. And so, I am going to ask Daniel Hannan, Lord Hannan, to come and help shape that over now and November 2nd to put his ideas down: working with people in CCHQ to try and help structure what we think that will be for the piece of work for the new Leader to do post November 2nd.
Similarly, and this points to the issues, not just really the need for change, not just being 2019, post 2019, but longer term change…. I think if we are honest, the Conservative Party has been asked to lead this country because we were for many, many decades stitched firmly into the fabric of our nation in all those little organisations and towns and villages and cities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And …through no particular reason, no one’s fault, over the last two decades, my observation would be that we’ve allowed ourselves to become, in some ways, unstitched from that fabric.
And we need to do some work to reconnect ..because it really is true …and I represented…I represent North Bedfordshire now. I am a Bedfordshire bloke but I represented Bedford before…the town of Bedford before….and Bedford is one of the most ethnically diverse areas. Very competitive with Labour… between us and Labour.
I knew that whichever community I was in, there were conservative values.
They didn’t always vote Conservative, but you could go and talk to people and they’d say “oh yeah, I agree with you” and they might support you. Similarly, I set up a community business school: I believe in… I’m a free market person. I believe in capitalism, I believe in enterprise, a spirit of enterprise. And I set up this community business school. We ran it on five Thursday evenings in Bedford, and I thought we might have 50 people show up, we had 300 people show up. And loads of young people… because, guess what, a lot of people like the idea of starting their own business, they like the idea of creating things, they like the idea of putting their talents to work…yes, to make money…but mostly because they want to do something with their life.
And enterprise, free enterprise, free markets, that is the best way to harness that.
So, I wanted to do something on that. So, this idea of connectedness, how we reach out …all those different ways, I’m going to ask Penny Mordaunt to come and help put some of that together. She connects so well with people, that was my observation as an MP. The way she talks to people, connects with people and I know a lot of people like her as well.
So, let’s see those two put some ideas together ….and there’s other things I’m going to do…as I say…I think more on training and development. The Conservative Party I think… it’s a fantastic talent development machine, we never really harnessed it in an effective way, but we can do more on that.
So, lots and lots of things I think in terms of the third part of the speech, that will be what… if I am talking technically…I won’t say it in the speech would be sort of a strategic sprint. So, what can we put on these strategic areas of change, together…that looks like it can be an effective plan of action to help us put ourselves in a position to be once again that winning political force …that we can present by November the 2nd to the new leader. And that’s what I’m asking Daniel and Penny to help with, and I will get some other people to help with it as well.
GD: And I think what it seems to be is an answer, to one of the questions that I get quite a lot privately… is I’m concerned ‘we’re not done burning yet’, I feel like there’s still some things to work out. And you’re saying and what my view has been (and I’ve written it on Con Home) is I’m not sure you’ve got that luxury. It’s …you’ve got to get up and you’ve got to do this. You may pooh-pooh calls to unite, but you don’t really have the luxury of choice not to. Is that fair?
RICHARD FULLER: Well, look, I definitely agree that there’s no point just sitting around and just moping in a corner.
But it’s important to address that…. but that is the start of that: ‘And what are we going to do about it?’
And unity comes when you show that you have a clear direction, that you’re good at putting people to work, the people are enthused by that work and let people come on board to do what they want to do. And I think people will like the idea that we’re going to become much more active on our campuses. We are going to be positive about conservative ideas. I think people are going to like the idea that we’re going to be extolling the virtues of free enterprise again, that the idea that you take a risk and get a reward, you know, it’s something the Conservative Party is going to declare positively, and that will be part of our outreach… to connectedness, that we are going to take a conservative message to all different communities and to all different ages and all different parts of the country and to… you know, being a member of the Conservative Party demonstrates that you care about democracy and demonstrates that you believe in your country….and so, let’s get more people to join the party and be part of that…or find affinity with us in a way that makes them feel that they’re part of what we’re trying to do. That’s how you get unity – being positive in interactions and say, I absolutely agree… you can’t just sit around tending to your wounds, you have to patch up your wounds, get up and get back into battle.
GD: I have to ask, would you like to carry on doing it after November?
RICHARD FULLER: That’s not a decision for me to make….I tell you what, how I look at this, my way of looking at it is …. I have this the job ‘till November 2nd….now part of that has been pretty tough over the summer, letting people go, talking to people who lost their jobs as MPs, talking to candidates who didn’t win.
But part of it is also looking at using my life experience in the party and outside, thinking what is it …what are the priorities that we need to do … and then fearlessly, you know: I’m a consultant, I can take your watch and tell you the time..but equally, I can fearlessly say, here’s what I think you need to do, to the new leader of the party, as part of your mission, and here are my recommendations for what you need to do. And if he or she likes that plan, then he or she and I can have a conversation about who might be right person to take you forward.
GD: Thanks very much indeed for talking to Conservative Home.
RICHARD FULLER: Thanks.
