Earlier this week Alice Miles took David Cameron to task for being a little less than firm with local Conservative Associations that do not modernise.  In once sense, her criticism is unfair in that it expected too much of David Cameron's candidate selection process reform too early.  Much of the impetus for change will come from the “new blood” that has joined the Party and is joining the Party as a consequence of Mr Cameron’s leadership.  She fails also to understand one very important characteristic of Conservative Associations – no one can order them about, not by reason of there being any rule that says so, but because it would be un-Conservative to do so. They have to be changed from within and there lies the real problem.  New members will take time to “bed down” and are not likely to rock the boat too soon by pointing out some home truths to the established hierarchy.  As yet, there might not even be enough of them.  However, much of what Ms Miles said was justified.

Whilst rigging a selection process to positively discriminate in favour of say, women or ethnic minorities is not the way forward, for reasons rehearsed elsewhere upon numerous occasions in the past, the current “system” positively discriminates in favour of right-leaning, white, middle-class, middle-aged men.

The solution is very simple.  Mr Cameron must encourage persons of centre-leaning proclivities to join or rejoin the party, take a positive role in the local association and provide support when friction or obstruction arises from the old guard.  In brief, he has to actively court the “wets” who were so effectively marginalised during the Margaret Thatcher years.

I had long ceased to be a member of the Guildford Conservative Association when David Howell MP, now Lord Howell of Guildford, retired but I am well aware of the manner in which the next Conservative parliamentary candidate for Guildford came to be chosen. It is enough to say that the local association was fixated upon choosing another white middle-class male as their candidate. “We’ll have a woman MP over my dead body!” one of the members present at the selection process was overheard to say.  The local association duly ignored two female applicants of high quality and chose the middle class white male, the eminently invisible Nick St Aubyn who promptly lost the seat to the Liberal Democrats’ (female) candidate in the General Election of 2001 after serving just one term as Guildford’s MP.

It was not just a matter of the Association’s pinko-lefties such as myself having been “boiled away” after years of Thatcher worship by the Party generally, it was the fact that the right-winger/fogy alliance had a means of self-propagation ensuring that “their kind” always managed to run the show.

That is the challenge for Mr Cameron, to continue actively enticing Conservatives of a broader political spectrum than currently exists back into the party in such numbers that our opinions can no longer be ignored by the fogies.  We might not be able to increase significantly the number of female or ethnic minority Conservative MPs, but he can rest assured that no candidate will be rejected simply because they are gay or black or Muslim or female.[1]