Are Conservative members in revolt against their own party? One sitting MP who has recently been warned he potentially faces being deposed by his local association before the next election fears it could be the case.
“We’re not generally an activist bunch, deselecting people,” the MP lamented. “It’s just not the Tory way – we like to leave all that to Labour.”
The MP wants to remain anonymous for now, hoping the selection committee meeting will go their way. But for three sitting Tories, the axe has already fallen, most notably Damian Green, once Theresa May’s deputy prime minister but now at grave risk of being left seatless.
There are obvious perils in divining a pattern from such a handful of cases, and some party veterans insist the recent rejection of Green, plus that of two 2019-intake MPs, Theo Clarke and Sally-Ann Hart, is nothing more than business as usual in a party just as brutal as Labour in such matters, if usually quieter about it.
But there are several new factors in play. One is the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), set up by key Boris Johnson allies Peter Cruddas, the businessman and Tory peer, and the former MEP David Campbell Bannerman.
As well as pushing for a radically member-focused revamp of the party, with a directly elected chair, the CDO also wants local members to have a far greater say in candidate selections.
Some reports have painted the CDO as a Johnson front organisation, tapping into the anger of a membership still devoted to the former prime minister, to wreak revenge on MPs who helped depose him.
Campbell Bannerman says this is a misreading of its actual mission: restoring autonomy to a candidate selection system too often used by Conservative central office to parachute in former ministerial advisers, and in the process weed out MPs who are performing badly.
“In the old days, central office’s job was to eliminate the bad, the mad and the sad, not to try and socially engineer the selection of candidates,” he said.
“We’re not claiming credit for deselecting any individual poorly performing MP. But we do claim credit for empowering a membership to make their own decisions. And that’s an important distinction.”
Another complication is that the next election will be held under revised constituency boundaries, with many seats changing shape and some disappearing altogether.
Green, for example, was not rejected by the Ashford constituency he has represented since 1997, but when seeking to be the candidate for a new Weald of Kent seat, which takes in some of his current electorate.
A series of party sources have dismissed the idea that Green lost out because Johnson-loving members viewed him as hostile to the former PM, instead arguing they wanted a fresh start – and that some felt Green arrived at the selection with an assumption that he would be picked.
Similarly, there is no evidence that Clarke or Hart are victims of a Johnsonist plot. Clarke, the Stafford MP, linked her deselection to her recent maternity leave, something denied by the local party chair.
Hart, the MP for Hastings and Rye, was deselected earlier this month. While the reasons have not been made public, it is understood it is connected to local party factors, including a faction of members having another preferred candidate. Rejected MPs can seek a vote of the full membership, which Clarke and Hart are doing.
Unpicking common threads is all the more difficult because of the often tiny number of people involved in the initial selection decisions, made by a committee comprising representatives from local areas within the association.
“This can be up to 20 people, but it’s often much less,” one local constituency chair said. “Because we don’t have a lot of members, and not all of those even turn up, a fairly small number of people can have a disproportionate impact. It can get a bit dirty.”
But there are certainly those who believe that local Tory members have become more interventionist and rebellious, perhaps unsurprisingly in a party whose MPs have removed three prime ministers in less than four years.
And while there are few apparent signs of an orchestrated plot against MPs seen as having betrayed Johnson, local chairs routinely report that he remains hugely popular among members, with significant disquiet about his removal.
This could not be ignored, Campbell Bannerman said, much though Rishi Sunak and his team might wish to: “It does seem that No 10 are wetting themselves over the fact that Boris is a factor in these deselections. They’re trying to deny it fervently and almost say that it’s just the members who are awful.
“But there are a lot of factors, including MPs’ performance, and simply that members don’t like being railroaded.”
The MP who faces possible deselection by his local party said it had been made clear to him that his support for Johnson’s removal was the key reason.
“I have nothing against the man. It was only because of the damage he was doing to the party,” the MP said. “But some members – and it doesn’t take many to make trouble – are now after me for supposed treachery. If we’re turning into the sort of party where this happens, I’m not sure I want to be a part of it.”
Other party-watchers, however, are sceptical that we are witnessing a great awakening of the Tory grassroots.
The local party chair dismissed the role of the CDO as “overegged and mainly on Twitter”, adding: “It can be a brutal game, and it can be fixed, there are stitch-ups. But is there any kind of membership revolt? I don’t think so.”
Another veteran senior Tory said similar events also happened before the 2017 and 2019 elections, but these were snap polls with many candidates selected or deselected at speed.
“There has always been a sense of members wanting their say, and it’s not uncommon for them to reject Central Office’s preferred candidate,” they said. “But this time we’re seeing all these dramas as individual episodes played out over time. In 2017 and 2019, people just didn’t notice it.”
