Daily Mail: The Conservative Party Is Dying

Peter Oborne writes: 

John and Caroline Strafford have been married for 50 years — and Conservative Party members for 53. I know them well, and we always meet up when I attend the Tory Party conference each year, and occasionally elsewhere. Honest, decent and patriotic, John and Caroline are typical of the party members who have helped make the Conservatives the most successful party in the Western world for the past 200 years, and — I am certain — an immeasurable force for good. 

They ran a small manufacturing business for four decades, bringing up three children as they did so, while still finding time in their busy lives for public service. John was a Kensington and Chelsea councillor, and later treasurer and then chairman of Beaconsfield constituency association. John and Caroline are the heart and soul of the Conservative Party and of Britain, too. It is people like them who make the world go round. They pay their taxes. They generate employment. They stand on their own feet. They serve the community. In their quiet way, it is the Straffords of this world who put the great into Great Britain. 

And it is them, and others like them, who slave away during general elections to get out the vote, run the local party machinery and make the Conservative Party a functioning organisation. Naturally, the party high command utterly despises them. The sharp-suited career politicians hate activists like the Straffords, who have genuine beliefs, don’t tell lies and enter public service for purely honourable reasons. 

The Tory chairman, Sir Patrick McLoughlin, has done nothing for ordinary members. To be fair to Sir Patrick, his predecessor Lord Feldman (chairman under David Cameron) was far worse. While Sir Patrick is merely useless, Feldman didn’t even make any secret of the lacerating contempt he felt for Tory activists. On one occasion, after a late-night dinner, it is alleged he told a group of political journalists he regarded them as ‘swivel-eyed loons’, though he continues to deny it. With men like Feldman and McLoughlin at the top of the Tory Party, it’s no surprise that party membership is not merely in decline, it is in collapse. 

There were more than three million Tory Party members in the years after World War II, though this number had halved to 1.5million by the mid-Seventies. By the time Margaret Thatcher was defenestrated by Tory MPs in 1990, there were approximately one million members. But it was David Cameron who delivered the death blow. He inherited more than 250,000 members when he became leader in 2005. In a decade, that number had sunk to around 125,000. Cameron and Feldman have moved on. Having done well out of the Conservative Party, they are following the revolting example of Tony Blair and doing very nicely thank you in the private sector. 

It’s always the faithful activists like John Strafford who remain loyal — but this week he delivered a bombshell. My old friend told Channel 4 political editor Michael Crick that he has had advance sight of the latest Tory membership figures. According to Strafford, the number now stands at 70,000. Seventy thousand! That’s less than one third of the number inherited by Cameron 12 years ago, and less than 10 per cent of the membership bequeathed by Maggie Thatcher to John Major in 1990. It is such a derisory figure that it raises searching questions as to whether the Conservative Party can continue to exist at all.

It was so deeply shocking that I felt I needed to check it. I rang up Tory headquarters, who refused to comment. I take this as confirmation that the number is correct. After all, Labour makes no secret of its party membership. They have nothing to hide. Last December, the number stood at 570,000, over eight times more than the Conservatives. (Labour received ten times more than the Tories in party membership fees in 2016.) 

The Conservative Party is dying — and the consequences for democracy are terrible. As it did in 2016, it may well fall once more to this diminishing band to select a new leader — and thus the probable next Prime Minister — at some point. I don’t doubt the vast majority are decent people, but most are over 65 and hardly reflect the views of the nation as a whole. This week, the new Tory MP Andrew Bowie suggested the party has fewer than 10,000 members aged under 30, and feels like a ‘fringe group’ to millions of younger voters. 

Crucially, you can’t fight an election with an army of just 70,000 activists. Worst of all, the collapse of the membership has made the Tory Party almost totally dependent on wealthy donors — hard-faced and, in some cases, unscrupulous people — many of whom expect a return for their money. I went to see party chairman McLoughlin not long after Theresa May became leader. I wanted to learn how he planned to renew the party membership which had been taken for granted by David Cameron. It was soon obvious he did not have a single idea about how to galvanise more people to join. He fobbed me off with anecdotes about the times he met Margaret Thatcher 30 years earlier. 

I cannot understand why Mrs May has allowed this useless individual to occupy such a pivotal position for so long. In any half-decent business, McLoughlin would have been sacked ages ago. To be fair, he is not a bad man, merely an incompetent one. I am an admirer of Theresa May, and it pains me to say that she has failed as Tory leader to reinvigorate the grass roots of the party. Reform is urgent. There is talk of a reshuffle next week, and the Prime Minister must appoint a powerful and energetic figure who can relaunch the Conservative Party. 

If Mrs May does not address this problem as a matter of urgency, there will soon be no Conservative Party left to fight the next election in four years’ time. John and Caroline Strafford, and thousands of other like them, are magnificent servants of the party, but they cannot do it all on their own.