Collapsing Conservative Party Membership?

As some of us have been saying for eight years, including on here, it was the 2005 figure that was obviously wrong.

Who were they? Where were they? Where had they been throughout the previous dozen years? Lo and behold, though, more than two thirds of them voted for the Heir to Blair.

A quarter of a million Conservative Party members in 2005? From where? Their machine had spent more than a decade closing down all over the country, and the remaining cogs ranged from the old to the very old.

But suddenly, as soon as a Blair clone of whom no one had previously heard was the media-approved candidate for Leader, there were a quarter of a million of them, of whom more than two thirds proceeded to vote for the socially liberal Europhile and global adventurist backed by Murdoch and the BBC.