Conservative Party Chairman - John Rentoul in "The Independent"

 Extract from an article by John Rentoul in The Independent 12 November 2022

The important question now is whether either or both parties can go back to the election of leaders by MPs alone. The Conservatives seem more likely to. It is significant that Conservative Home, the activists’ website founded by Tim Montgomerie and now edited by Paul Goodman, a Tory former MP, has proposed a deal by which members give up the right to vote in leadership elections in exchange for the right to elect the party chair, who has a seat in the cabinet.

Even more significant was that this was supported this week by John Strafford, who is a junction-box in the hidden wiring of the Tory party. He runs an outfit called the Campaign for Conservative Democracy, and for decades he has been a mirror image of the Bennites in the Labour Party – except that he is no ideologue and is not promoting a faction within the party. He is a sincere advocate of members’ rights, but he can see that the idea that such rights are advanced by a vote in leadership elections is “fatally flawed”. He rightly focuses on the right to select candidates free of interference from Tory HQ, a form of party democracy that is compatible with constitutional principle.

Unfortunately, it will never be a prime minister’s priority to change the rules back. Rishi Sunak will not want to antagonise the majority of Party members who want to retain their vote in leadership elections. A rule change depends on a cluster of people, including Nadhim Zahawi, the party chair, Peter Booth, the deputy chair, and activists such as Strafford: they have to accept that it is in the party’s and the country’s interest to make the change.