The UK Conservative Party cleans house – POLITICO

LONDON — If Rishi Sunak’s mission is to make politics boring again, he needs to start with his own MPs. 

After a seemingly endless string of scandals involving Tory politicians — from parliamentary porn-viewing, to bullying and outright sexual assault — party chiefs are intent on cleaning up their image at the next general election.

Sick of lurid headlines, officials in Tory HQ are beefing up the vetting procedure for would-be-MPs ahead of the next national poll, widely expected to take place in 2024.

The aim is to replace a number of departing Tory MPs who — for a variety of reasons — found themselves embroiled in scandal with a slick new generation of scrupulously-vetted politicians.

Anne Jenkin, a Tory peer who has led the drive to elect more female Conservatives, said the process of getting on the candidates’ list will be “far more stringent” and that “it would be harder to get through if you have a history of bad behavior.”

“The powers that be are far more aware and far less tolerant of accepting it,” she added.

A senior party aide confirmed this was a priority as Greg Hands, the Conservative Party chairman, moves towards the target of selecting 100 candidates by the annual Tory conference in October.

“We want to put the best people forward and ensure they go through a really rigorous process,” said the adviser, while stressing the system is kept under constant review. 

Testing, testing

The Tories’ past focus on skills such as parliamentary debating is shifting, officials say, with a fresh emphasis on American-style psychometric testing, designed to root out candidates ill-suited to to the unique pressures of parliamentary life.

More background and financial checks are also being applied under the direction of CCHQ official Matt Wright, the party’s head of candidates and a former business recruiter, in an effort to root out those only interested in celebrity, or with potentially damaging skeletons in the closet.

Successful candidates are being placed into one of three tiers: “comprehensive,” which allows them to apply for any seat in the country; “key,” which allows them to apply only for seats in a specific region — usually where they live — and “development,” the lowest designation, meaning they can only stand for seats with electors unlikely to actually vote Conservative. 

In dividing up the seats, CCHQ officials had to take account of incoming boundary changes, meaning the disappearance of some hitherto “safe” seats and the creation of a few new ones, which will be fiercely fought over.

Some activists who were previously approved as candidates have been blocked from standing altogether, several people with knowledge of the process said.

“CCHQ are being more careful with who they select after getting their fingers burned in 2019,” as one Tory candidate put it. “They are clamping down on people who are known lunatics.”

Lessons of 2019

A 2024 general election would be the first in nine years to take place at the end of a “normal” five-year parliamentary cycle — markedly different from the snap elections called with little warning by former PMs Theresa May in 2017 and Boris Johnson in 2019.

Ahead of both those polls the normal selection processes had to be truncated, with party chiefs scrambling to find suitable candidates in time.

For the Tories the issue was compounded in 2019 by Johnson’s subsequent landslide victory, returning dozens of Tory candidates in seats which party officials had never really considered winnable. The results have been mixed.

Some of those new MPs have since opted to quit in pursuit of saner professions, worn down by the demands of the job and by personal abuse.

Others have been mired in serious scandal. While not restricted to the 2019 intake, two conspicuous examples are the former Tory MP for Wakefield Imran Ahmad Khan, jailed for sexual assault, and the MP for Delyn, Rob Roberts, who had the Tory whip permanently suspended after an investigation found he sexually harassed a junior member of staff.

Cull of the narcissists

A former CCHQ official said a previous planned overhaul of the selection system under May had been cut short by the 2019 election, but they had since developed “a much more methodical approach” to being approved and shortlisted. 

One approved candidate who was not authorized to speak publicly said the party was focusing increasingly on hopefuls’ personality and temperament. 

Potential candidates have been invited to agree or disagree with statements such as “I really enjoy being the center of attention” and “I’m always the first one to suggest a party.”

”They obviously don’t want people who are going to be a shrinking violet,” said the candidate, “but they don’t want abject narcissists either, of which there have been quite a few in the recent past.”

Other exercises include drafting a press release on a local development, such as a wind farm, and giving a five-minute talk on a topical subject close to their heart.

Despite the concerted effort being made to turn out a strong field of candidates, party insiders admit there is a limit to what they can do. 

“We don’t have access to the police database or anything like that,” said another Conservative adviser. “We try to ensure certain people don’t slip through the net but we are limited in that regard.”

An additional, more old-fashioned layer of screening is still applied, whereby a party grandee will ring up a candidate and ask: “Is there anything in your past that might embarrass us?” 

The effectiveness of this method, of course, depends on honesty.

Grassroots gripes

Pressure to do better on candidate selection is coming not only from on high but from the bottom up. Local associations were vexed by the rapid, centrally-driven nature of the 2019 process.

“There are a lot of constituencies where members want to flex their muscles,” said William Atkinson, a Tory activist and journalist who has been watching selections closely for grassroots bible ConservativeHome. 

The pressure is all the more acute, Atkinson noted, because the past year has seen two Conservative leaders who had been elected by party members unilaterally forced out by mutinous Tory MPs.

Party chairman Hands, a long-serving minister and MP for an affluent west London seat, is popular among his fellow MPs, who rate him as a likable, trusted campaigner. But at a local level, not every Tory is enthused.

One senior activist in a so-called Red Wall seat — an umbrella name for less affluent parts of the post-industrial north of England — said Hands’ only real contact so far had been to impress on them the importance of gathering membership data.

“I don’t think he’s doing much to gee up the troops,” they complained. “In fact, I think if you asked our association who’s chairman of the party, most people would struggle for a minute.”

The same activist argued this pointed to a wider problem with a lack of star quality in the Cabinet around which members could rally. Top billing at a recent “away day” for Conservative MPs went to former leader Michael Howard, who stepped down almost 20 years ago after losing the 2005 election.

“We were thinking of trying to pull some strings and get some top brass down to breathe some life into things,” the activist added. “But apart from [Michael] Gove, who’s in the Cabinet now that’s any good?”

Anne Jenkin was speaking to Agnes Chambre for POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast.