Who determines the quality of Conservative MPs of the future?

 Julian Ellacot responds:

Nearly two years ago when I was elected Chairman of the National Convention, my top commitment was to overhaul candidate selection, pledging:

“I will ensure that this is led by a senior volunteer as Chairman of Candidates, accountable to you, the Convention. Candidates must prove their Conservative credentials and campaigning abilities, and members must be fully involved in selecting them, well in advance of the next General Election.”

Working with Clare Hambro as a superb Chairman of Candidates, and with Kemi and her team, all the foundations for this are now in place, and we are on our way to selecting talented, committed and energetic Conservatives, ready to Get Britain Working Again. 

So Julian we continue with the disastrous selection process we have had for the last 25 years whereby a small group of people unelected, unaccountable to the ordinary members of the Party determine who can be a Conservative parliamentary Candidate. CCHQ's role should solely be to conduct due dilligence!

Go back to pre 1998 when the ordinary Party members decided who they wanted as their MP. The results then were high quality. Once again the ordinary members are being treated with contempt and you wonder why membership is collapsing.! Soon the Conservative Party will cease to exist as a membership organisation and inevitably the parliamentary party will go into decline?

As Per today's Sunday Telegraph

A powerful and clear statement from Kemi Badenoch about the quality of MP we need in future:

Conservative Parliamentary Candidates

• " must be clever"  What is "clever"   Is it a university degree or what?   The Candidates Committee will decide!
• "have charisma"   Who decides someone has charisma - the Candidates Committee!
• "communication skills" How is this assessed and by whom? - the Candidates Committee!
• "conviction" - Conviction in what?   The Candidates Committee will decide!
• "most importantly, be Conservative" For the last 25 years the Candidates Committee didn't understand what being a Conservative meant!   What has changed.?
• So there we are.   The Candidates Committee must be super human with all these abilities.   Perhaps they should be judged by ordinary members of the party to see if they meet up to the same criteria they are imposing on the parliamentary candidates!

Changes to the Conservative Party Constitution Phase 5

 Here we go again!   Watch this space!

22 May 2026 Dear John,  Thank you to the many of you who provided your input in response to the first two phases of consultation on changes to the Party Constitution. The responses have been analysed and draft text updated as a result.  To recap on the process, we are reviewing the Constitution in phases, starting last year and running until later this year.  Each phase covers different topics, on each of which you will have the opportunity to have your say.  Once all sections of the Constitution have been covered all of the proposed changes will be put to a vote (in line with the Constitution).  We have now moved onto to Phase 5, which covers provisions relating to:  The Party Board Recognised Organisations, Specialist Groups and Other Bodies  The document setting out suggested changes and questions for your consideration is here.  Please review the document and then use this online survey to submit your views on these topics.  The consultation will close on Sunday 7 June.  There will be an online call at 6.30pm on Tuesday 2 June for you to discuss these topics and provide your input. Please use this link to register for the call in advance. Association and Federation Chairmen are also encouraged to share this consultation with your fellow Officers, Executive Councils, staff and any particularly interested members, and host local meetings to discuss it and provide feedback (as some of you did for previous Phases).  If you wish to submit marked up text instead, please download the discussion document above, mark up the text in the first column, and email as an attachment to national.convention@conservatives.com, or if you prefer a freeform text response, just email it to the same address.  Finally, following the consultation on Schedules 7/7A earlier in the year, the comments received have been analysed and an updated draft produced.  Given its significance, we are circulating the draft to enable any further comment – if you have any comments, please email national.convention@conservatives.com.  The updated draft is here.  Thank you in for your participation in this important task.

 

Yours sincerely,   Julian Ellacott Chairman of the National Convention and Chairman of the Constitution Review Committee

 

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.

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.

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Sunday, 1 March, 2026

I’m standing to be your voluntary party representative on the Board of the Conservative Party. For more than fifty years, I’ve been part of our voluntary party — as a councillor, an association chairman, an area chairman, and now as Deputy Chairman Political for the South East Region.

Lead up to the 2001 General Election

 

Lead up to the 2001 General Election with the delightful Cheryl Gillan MP - a great Lady!