This article is taken from the June 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10

Does the quality of members of Parliament matter? How can it not? We live in a parliamentary system. Most ministers are drawn from the elected House of Commons, rather than the appointed House of Lords. And we must believe that ministers make some difference to the way government departments perform.

If, then, MPs become less able, the system will be worse run. So how do we produce MPs? In a party system such as Britain’s, we get them care of the processes parties use internally to select their candidates in safe or target seats. If the calibre of MPs has indeed diminished, and our government is steadily poorer as a result, it follows that we must first look to the process of how we selected them.

The current Conservative government is sliding ignominiously to defeat and opposition. But for even longer than the 13 years in which the party has been failing in office, the Tories’ selection processes have been the fruit of the ingenuity of two sometime journalists.

First canvassed 21 years ago, the “Gold List” (subsequently A-List) was the handiwork of Michael Gove and Dean Godson. Gove, now the Secretary of State for Levelling-Up, Housing and Communities, was then on the staff of The Times; Godson, now a peer and director of the think tank Policy Exchange, worked for the Daily Telegraph (rejoicing in the title of “special assistant to Conrad Black”).

Elections could be rigged in favour of preferred candidates

In short, the A-List transformed the Tories’ selection process by stripping the power of individual Conservative associations to pick whoever applied for their candidacy from amongst the party’s list of approved candidates. Instead, Conservative Central Office would sieve the would-be applicants and hand to the association those candidates the party centrally thought they should be allowed to see. It is worth examining closely the arguments Gove and Godson used privately at the time to justify this.

Their case, made first abortively to Iain Duncan Smith, then implemented more fully by his successor as party leader, Michael Howard, before being perfected under David Cameron, was essentially tokenism for marketing.

“We should aim to deliver 50 per cent women candidates, 20 per cent ethnic minority candidates and at least one or two openly gay candidates,” Gove and Godson secretly urged in 2002. “Some people,” they helpfully added as if for the benefit of Mr Duncan Smith’s comprehension, “may fit into more than one category.”

Critical to their plan was secrecy and deception:

The clever approach is to maintain the illusion that a good section of approved candidates is being offered, while ensuring that this consists entirely of people who we positively want to get selected for safe seats. Like a conjuror, we will get more applause if the audience cannot see exactly how the trick is performed

In this fashion, selections could be rigged in favour of preferred candidates, even though, Gove and Godson explained, “most of the talented candidates on the list are white and male”. This, however, the two Tory modernisers asserted, damaged the Tory brand, hence, “political market forces cannot be allowed to prevail”.

It would be unkind to note too many of the triumphs the A-List produced. Nick Boles, Louise Mensch and Anna Soubry tell one story, but many of the other Tory MPs produced by the A-List have not yet defected to rival parties.

As the A-List rolled on, opposition mounted inside the Conservative Party. The “turnip Taliban” infamously almost rejected sometime A-Lister, and sometime republican Lib Dem, Liz Truss. Yet the more recalcitrant local associations were in adopting the candidates the centre required of them for higher branding purposes, the more determined the party leadership became.

Gove and Godson got their way and the candidates David Cameron fielded were the ones his supporters claimed looked like modern Britain. Even if to his critics they looked awfully like his friends.

While Cameron failed to actually win outright the 2010 general election with his A-Listers — being forced instead to rely on 57 Lib Dems — Tory candidate selection was irrevocably changed by his decade leading the party.

He additionally came armed with the powers first used by Michael Howard in the 2005 general election, when the then Tory leader deselected Howard Flight for privately suggesting as a shadow minister that taxes would have to go up. Howard was able to do this because a Blairite contrivance called PPERA (the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000) had created a party office of “nominating officer”. This meant that central party organisations, rather than individual constituency associations, could now deselect MPs or candidates.

This completed the circle: the party leadership not only supplied the candidates that local members could pick, it could dismiss the candidates centrally at will, too.

We have now gone through a generation of MPs produced by the whim of the managers who run party machines

The logic of Gove and Godson’s case, even if sincerely meant, was proven false by the inability of Cameron to secure more than 36.1 per cent of the vote, despite being up against the epically unpopular Gordon Brown. It may have been supposed to be marketing, and not just a ramp to select their friends as MPs (something Tory associations were noticeably unkeen on doing, left to their own devices), but it did not work. The party remained unpopular. However, the composition of the party in the House of Commons had, nevertheless, been fundamentally changed, thanks to the A-Listers.

Have the Tory MPs produced by this method delivered a higher calibre of politician — whether on backbenches or on the front? Thirteen years of Tory rule gives an inescapable answer: picking MPs because of the way they’re supposed to look does not produce good government.

We will in due course have a Labour government again. In this issue David Littlefair looks at the sort of people that party is selecting as candidates, soon sure enough to be its MPs.  Although Labour remains in truth markedly less centrally-controlled than the Tories, it would be foolhardy to think the 2024 class of Labour MPs is going to produce a government markedly superior to the one we have now.

Is there anything to be done about this? Yes. PPERA is certainly the most outrageous way the party leaderships have served themselves by destroying from within what was meant to be the very point of our parliamentary system: local representation. But it could be undone by exactly the same means.

If we accept that parties have to exist, then instead of regulating them for their own benefit, we could regulate them for ours. An Act of Parliament could require that the only entity of a duly constituted political party which could lawfully select a parliamentary candidate is their constituency association.

This would place the power to determine the choice of candidates not in the hands of metropolitan wire-pullers, but in those of the people who, by definition, are going to work hard to see them elected.

We have now gone through a generation of MPs produced by the whim of the managers who run party machines. It is time to go back to the selection of candidates by constituency associations and nobody else. We have lived through the modernisers’ future and it has failed. This change should be done openly and honestly and our politics will be immeasurably improved by it.