This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

Dear Richard,

I’m sorry to be so late in congratulating you on your appointment as Conservative Party chairman — though to do so at all may be an error of judgement and taste.

After all, you are the eleventh chairman to hold the post in the past five years. That’s an incumbency rate of less than six months each — a fact which highlights not only the chaos of the last government, but the withering of a once formidable post.

For amongst those successors to Rab Butler, Iain Macleod, Cecil Parkinson and Chris Patten were Amanda Milling, Andrew Stephenson, Sir Jake Berry and Richard Holden. This is so backward a progress as to make one doubt the truth of evolution.

But there is more to the matter than yesterday’s politicians always looking bigger than today’s — a view usually formed less by objectivity than nostalgia. The post has shrivelled because the party has shrivelled. This raises the question of whether there can truly be a Conservative electoral recovery without a revived Conservative Party.

Size isn’t everything, but it matters. Conservative membership maxed out in the early 1950s, reaching a peak of some 2.8 million members. Lewis Baston’s biography of Reginald Maudling gives the flavour of the times. “Something like one elector in five in Barnet was a Conservative Party member,” he writes.

One wonders how many electors are Conservative members now — in Chipping Barnet and everywhere else. Whatever the answer may be, the seat went Labour in June, for the first time in its history. Admittedly, Conservative membership is no longer a mark of social respectability. The reverse, if anything.

People now have options they didn’t then. The Young Conservatives famously operated as a marriage bureau during those post-war years. But the deep, deep peace of the double bed has been superseded by the hurly-burly of online dating. I understand that being a self-declared Conservative in the exciting world of Bumble and Grindr is no guarantee of romantic success.

Nonetheless, the gradual widening of those options didn’t swiftly extinguish mass Conservative membership. As recently as 1990, it stood at about a million members — roughly one in 40 of the adult population. That was a formidable distribution mechanism for Conservative attitudes, arguments and, yes, ideas.

The party no longer declares its membership. Your predecessor but one, Greg Hands, said that this is because “it kind of creates media stories about short-term rises and falls in membership, which can sometimes be related to operational things, rather than the affection in which the party is held at any given time”.

Corbynistas, Cleggmaniacs, Faragistas: they have their exits and their entrances

But the same might be said of, say, the Campaign for Real Ale — which had about 180,000 members last time I looked. That’s rather more than the 142,000 or so who voted in the 2002 leadership election in which Liz Truss bested Rishi Sunak. Whatever the current Conservative membership figure may be, one can’t imagine the Campaign for Real Ale withholding its membership figure, on the ground that the media might otherwise report in a way that would displease its members. Or at least its governing authorities.

It will be claimed that the age of mass party political membership is dead — killed off by social change, the idiot wind of hysterical media and politicians’ own foibles and failures. The eruption of Reform UK proves this case rather than the reverse. It now claims a membership of about 45,000.

But members of Reform UK, of course, aren’t really members of a political party at all — if by that term one means a body which at least pretends to self-government. Nigel Farage owns 53 per cent of the party. In essence, it’s his property, and Reform UK’s members have no meaningful rights at all. Properly speaking, they are supporters, not members. Reform UK is a fan club, not a political party.

Is this the wave of the future? Reform UK may be a Potemkin party, as the Brexit Party was before it. Perhaps this is how it will be: new political movements will come like the thunder and vanish like the wind — illuminating the political landscape with a lightning flash before vanishing into the darkness from which they came. Corbynistas, Cleggmaniacs, Faragistas: they have their exits and their entrances.

It may be significant that Farage himself doesn’t seem to see it that way. Look at a map of where Reform UK came second in the general election: south Essex, South Wales, parts of Merseyside and Greater Manchester, much of the North East. That’s where the new competitor to the Conservative Party will make its push in local elections — as UKIP did before it, briefly becoming the fourth party of local government in England.

All this leads to the decision that you must now make.

You could reasonably decide that the eleventh Conservative Party chairman in five years will soon give way to the twelfth — and that it would be a waste of your time to do anything much other than to help facilitate the coming leadership election to the best of your ability.

After all, any review you commission or plan you make will doubtless be torn up by your successor — assuming that the new leader replaces you with one of his supporters, as has been the practice in recent years.

The alternative is to draw on your long experience of the party — after all, you’ve been a member for the best part of 40 years — and set out proposals that others can pick up. And as a businessman yourself, you have a model example to follow.

Frederick James Marquis, the first Earl of Woolton, was the chairman of Lewis’ department stores and, later, the most successful chairman that the Conservative Party has ever had — at least, if one’s measure is building up the party as an electoral machine, rather than successfully conveying its message to voters.

Woolton led the drive helping to take Conservative membership to its peak, so the first decision you’d have to take in following his example is whether that push can be replicated.

In essence, you must decide whether the Conservative Party should be a top-down body, run from the leader’s office; or a bottom-up one, run by the local associations.

As you know well, the party began as neither: its origins lie in constituency support for Conservative MPs, at least in terms of its growth as a mass movement. This is a reminder that parliamentary parties are intrinsic to parliamentary government. Since one of the main purposes of the Conservative Party is to help return a Conservative government, Conservative MPs have a key part in any settlement.

At any rate, there is no doubt which model presently applies. Some MPs complain that the party reforms carried out by Archie Norman under William Hague’s leadership gave party members too much power. This is wide of the mark.

The main right of party members these days is to elect a leader every now and again from a menu presented to them by MPs. Once in post, the leader is very close to being an absolute monarch. He appoints the Conservative Party chairman. He controls the Conservative Party board (in effect). He sets the political strategy. Whatever it may be, it requires winning target seats — on which money and resources are concentrated.

The absolute monarch must live in daily fear of sudden regicide, but that in no way diminishes his power. The story of the past 25 years or so is of the short-term winning out over the long. There is nothing much in CCHQ for networks of Conservative businesspeople. Or academics. Or trade unionists. Or professionals. Or young people. Or ethnic minority media. Or faith communities. Time, energy and talent have been increasingly concentrated on target seats. A target seat today isn’t necessarily one tomorrow.

Debate about party reform is disproportionately concentrated on whether associations should have greater freedom to select candidates (they should) and whether a leader who Conservative MPs don’t want can be forced on them (he can’t).

To get to the heart of the matter, one must follow the money. Inevitably, the party leader is focused on the short term. The board should be incentivised to plan for the long. That’s not consistent with the leader ultimately controlling it.

A Woolton for our time would recommend the election of the board chairman, plus a majority of its members; local parties to have full access to their own members, and greater autonomy for associations in candidate selections.

I appreciate that this revival of grassroots democracy could go wrong — for example, board members could threaten to withhold funding unless the party leader agreed to policy positions supported by them but unpopular with voters.

But the alternative is the status quo — which has helped to bring the mighty Conservative Party to its present pass. So, the question poses itself: can you prove yourself to be a would-be Woolton? If you can, you will thoroughly deserve to stay in post. Even if the next Conservative leader is foolish enough to remove you.

Ever,
Paul