Dinah Glover: Part of party renewal means changing how we select our candidates

Dinah Glover is Chairman of London East Area Conservatives and of Bethnal Green and Bow Conservative Association.

Having lost the General Election so catastrophically last year we need be true to our core beliefs and rebuild to make us more agile.

As Kemi said we need to rewire and restructure. How can we do this?

I would suggest a simple starting point would be to redesign and rewire candidate selection.

We have to think how we want a future Conservative Party to look.

We certainly need it to be more popular with a larger membership and activist base. How do we do that? I would argue by the members having more control over Candidate Selection. One of the issues the Party has had in the past is the MPs are not necessarily in tune with the views of the membership, hence there being too many changes in leadership. MPs chosen by the membership should surely lead to a more cohesive Party.

As a Candidate Assessor I know that some of the process was unnecessary and didn’t produce the best candidates with the Associations not getting the opportunity to freely choose from the candidates list. An Association given the choice of 3 candidates, one of which is there to make up the numbers will not result in the activists being engaged and happy to help when needed.

The process needs to be far more political, rather than falling into the trap of it being some kind of HR interview testing project management skills, social awareness, EDI etc, etc. There should be far more emphasis on why someone wants to be an MP and in particular a Conservative MP. In the past the candidates political views were barely questioned. I managed to get the political question asked sooner in the interview rather than right at the end like it was the least important consideration.

Please don’t misunderstand, much of the previous process was good, but it should be made far more political.

When conducting the interview we should be able to see the application forms so we can dig down into their views. For some reason which I never understood we weren’t meant to know anything about the candidates making it easier for them to hide failings etc and harder for us to understand their achievements. What are we trying to do, protect closet Liberal Democrats? There is the public speaking session with Q&A but that needs to be beefed up perhaps with 2 candidates debating from opposing sides a particular topic. This after all is the role of an MP to do that in the Chamber or in Committee.

Candidates need to be able to:

• Uphold heir political conviction and ideas
• Be competent.
• Have a dexterity of mind and verbal communication.
• The ability to empathise and represent constituents.

Plus obviously they need to be vetted.

I would suggest that if the Candidates pass all the above they should be put on the list. We don’t need different grades of passes, fails etc. The Candidates team spent a huge amount of time working with development candidates, thus increasing the staff needed at CCHQ.

We should look at how we run the selections.

At each Association selection they had to be supervised by CCHQ staff, thus slowing down selections resulting in nowhere near all the Candidates being selected when Rishi stood in that ominous shower of rain back in July. It’s patently true the selections need to be fair and objective but Area Officers can run them if CCHQ don’t have the capacity which they probably won’t. Associations can set their criteria for their Candidate and once they want to move forward it should be advertised to all those candidates on the list who should be able to freely apply.

If the Associations are in control of their selection procedures and can genuinely choose their candidate rather than given 3 candidates with one being the one meant to win, the reserve and the one to make up numbers. I am sure if the Associations had genuine choice it would enthuse members and encourage them to stay members. It certainly did in the past. People openly said they were staying a member to have a say.

Having a simplified list and CCHQ not running all selections would allow CCHQ to be more streamlined and efficient producing a more engaged membership and I believe better MPs in a far more cohesive Party with a clear message for the public.

We need to reform ourselves as well as the country, so let’s get started.