Thursday, May 21, 2026

Lord Walker’s experience as a Conservative Candidate

Lord Walker’s experience as a Conservative Candidate

Edited extract from the “House Magazine”

Is this the way we treat applicants to become a Parliamentary Candidate? The Party members are entitled to hear his views and if unacceptable turn him down. It should not be an elite in CCHQ that impose their own views in determining whether an applicant should be on the Candidate’s List!

Until the last election, he (Lord Walker) had only ever voted for the Conservatives, to whom he donated £10,000 in 2020.

In a letter to Rishi Sunak in 2023, he said it was his “most fervent wish” to become a Tory parliamentary candidate, having “given my all to earning that privilege”.

By that point, Walker says he had spent two years door-knocking and leafleting for the party in the hope of being selected for a constituency at the general election.

“I did feel I was being given the endless runaround by CCHQ [Conservative Campaign Headquarters],” he says. “This was a long, committed process. I was not so arrogant to think I could just parachute in and bag a seat.”

Walker says his candidacy was repeatedly deferred, as the party told him he was being too outspoken on issues like sewage in Britain’s seas. But he says he had also become disillusioned by the Tories’ ideological direction.

“I just did not like the aping Reform kind of way that the politics was going. I could see the writing on the wall, and I think I’ve been broadly vindicated in them becoming a bit of a tribute band and this existential crisis they’re now having.”

There was nothing opportunistic, he insists, about his decision to switch his support to Labour in early 2024, and he points out that he has “never donated a penny” to the party.

Friday, May 15, 2026

Conservative Party Constitution - The establishment strikes back!

The Establishment strikes back!

Richard you can do better than this. Start by getting my name right and also the abbreviation of Campaign For Conservative Democracy!

The following article appeared on Richard Robinson's web site:

Is the Conservative Party Dead?

Saturday, 2 May, 2026

Articles

A couple of weeks ago, John Stafford published an article on his Campaign for Conservative Democracy (CCCD) website, that asked, “Is the Conservative Party Dead?”

John is a long‑standing Conservative activist who has become the leading voice for Party reform through the CCCD, a grassroots initiative advocating greater accountability, transparency, and member participation within the Party.

He founded the CCCD in the mid-1990s and although I was aware of his advocacy, I didn’t meet him until 2005, when we found ourselves on the same side, opposing Michael Howard’s proposed changes to the Constitution.

His argument now is that the Party has become over-centralised, with CCHQ taking control of fundraising, policy, the party conference and the approval of parliamentary candidates.

In making his argument he makes a number of contentious statements:

The candidates’ list was packed with “Lib/Dem inclined people, careerists who were in politics for the money because they could not get a job elsewhere.”

The Party has been taken over by the big donors and “did not want members”, but would rather like to be “like the Republican Party of the USA which is not a membership organization”.

“The voluntary Party now mainly comprises Councillors and their families”.

His prescription is a member-led party with an annual general meeting, members largely running party conference and appointing The Party Chairman, Two Deputy Chairmen, Treasurer, Chairman of the Candidates Committee and Chairman of the Policy Forum.

In making his case, he relies on a nostalgia for a golden age of party democracy that never existed, but I think he does reflect genuine issues for the Party and we need to engage with his criticisms. I don’t, however, believe that the solution is in the institutional changes he proposes.

There has been real change under new leadership. New candidate selection rules put Conservative principles at the heart of the approvals process and there is a strong commitment to giving associations the final say on candidate selection. The Conference committee is committed to increasing the voice of Party members at Conference. We will need to go further.

In my view, however, the greatest shift we need is cultural. CCHQ has to be much more a service organization to associations, and much less Command and Control.