I made my position clear in this column Electing Party Leaders (desmondswaynemp.com) when I argued that ordinary political party members should not choose the leaders of their parliamentary parties. The choices that they made, overturning the choice of their MPs, were disastrous for Labour with Jeremy Corbyn and for the Tories with Liz Truss.
Party Members should never have been granted that power. Nevertheless, taking acquired rights of members away from them is rather more difficult. Conservative Party membership is already increasing in response to the prospect of electing a new leader.
Changing the Party’s constitution to remove the membership vote would be controversial and would take some time to deliver, if indeed the two thirds majority from the members is a realistic prospect.
I fear that we are stuck with the existing system for the present. Perhaps in the medium-term we might placate members by reversing the current arrangements to allow the membership to have a role in thinning out the candidates, but to let MPs have exclusive choice between the final two candidates.
A number of Conservative supporters and former supporters did suggest to me during the election campaign and afterwards, that the division of right-of-centre voters between Conservative and Reform should be healed by somehow engineering the election of Nigel Farage as the Leader of the Conservative Party. I do not think there is the remotest possibility of this happening, nor should there be.
First, the suggestion is based on the false assumption that that those who voted for Reform were formerly Conservative voters and that the swiftest way to ‘repatriate’ them would be to engineer a Farage Leadership. Undoubtedly, the intervention of Reform turned a Tory defeat into something of a ‘wipe-out’ but is quite mistaken to believe that the collapse in Conservative votes was principally the work of Reform, and that therefore, an accommodation with it would repair the damage.
Lord Ashcroft’s polling suggests that only one quarter of those who voted Conservative 2019, but who abandoned the Party on 4th July, voted for Reform. The rest either stayed at home, or voted Labour, Lib Dem and Green. That polling bears out my own experience on the doorsteps.
Second, it is just pie in the sky. There is no such deal to be had.
Somehow, I find myself on Farage’s mailing list. He emailed last week clearly indicating his belief that Conservatives are a spent force, that he aims to first destroy, and then to replace them. And to that end, he is already focussed on the next phase of the endeavour: the council elections next May.
Third, the very idea is grotesque, that Conservatives should embrace a man as leader, who, when asked to name the politician he most admired replied that it was Putin.
He has become an apologist for the invasion of Ukraine; And he is the most enthusiastic devotee at the shrine of Donald Trump – stepping forward to defend even Trump’s most egregious excesses.
Were such a leadership a possibility, and mercifully it isn’t, nothing could be more calculated to bury Conservatism for the foreseeable future.