Only the Tories are election-ready

13 January 2007

The Conservatives are assumed to be in financial trouble. Fraser Nelson reveals that the truth is just the opposite: the Tory leader has set up a successful fundraising machine that will force Labour into abject dependence on the unions

Here is a rare example of a harness being fitted to Mr Hilton, and a sign of the clout exercised by Ian McIsaac, the party’s little-known finance director, who vetoed his spending. A former partner at Deloitte, he joined the Conservatives as a retirement job. ‘He thought he’d be working a three-day week,’ laughs one party manager. Introducing serious financial management to the decrepit party machine has taken far more time. But his medicine is working — and is much appreciated. When KPMG management consultants were called to survey Tory headquarters last summer, they left with few suggestions to make.

But there is one thing money cannot buy — any means of standing up Mr Cameron’s claim at the party conference in Bournemouth that there are ‘25,000 new members’. When he was elected leader there were 253,689 registered members entitled to vote. Last September, when the party consulted on its ‘built to last’ policy, this had dropped by 6,295. Extraordinarily, this suggests that in the first nine months of Mr Cameron’s leadership the party lost more members than it gained.

Mr Maude is known for looking for the cloud in every silver lining, and he has one here. No matter how healthy the bank balance, or how formidable the opinion-poll lead, elections cannot be won without a nationwide apparatus of party workers getting out voters. Today, only a hundred Tory party agents remain: a third of the figure there were even in the dying days of John Major’s government. Money cannot buy fertiliser for the Tory grassroots, and the army for the next general election is a long way from being raised. But one thing seems certain: the war chest will be bulging.