Who would want to work in Conservative Campaign Headquarters? The election this year was certainly not Tory high command’s finest hour, with rows over stitch-ups and misallocated resources neatly topping off the party’s worst election result in history. So with discontent high among both MPs and members, it is no surprise that Tory leadership contenders are lining up to criticise their own party establishment, according to a series of leaked recordings given to Mr S.
First up, Robert Jenrick, who is keen to present himself as the candidate most keen to overhaul the party machine. He wants to scrap the CCHQ-approved candidates’ list so that any member can stand and made his withering views clear when speaking to the Conservative Friends of the NHS group in August. ‘One of the first things we’re going to have to do is to radically reform CCHQ. It needs to be refounded, frankly’, he said before joking that he wouldn’t go so far as to ‘burn down CCHQ’, as one Tory member had suggested to him. Relief for the (few) staff left working there then.
The Newark MP also suggested there was a culture of cronyism in the party under Rishi Sunak’s leadership. ‘I never want there to be a situation ever again where the favoured sons and daughters of a leader have been parachuted into ostensibly safe seats. I think that is hugely disrespectful to members’, he said, lamenting how ‘members of our party have been disrespected by the people who run it’. He also implied that ‘apparatchiks in the party and the leader’ had ‘screwed over at the last minute’ those on the Conservative candidates list by imposing candidates from above.
Jenrick made similar remarks that same day to a meeting of Blue Beyond, a group of young Conservatives. He told the group that ‘too many Prime Ministers have filled their teams with their friends, their supporters, their cronies. It hasn’t been meritocratic or not sufficiently meritocratic.’ Guess he’s not after Richard Holden’s vote…
It is not just Jenrick who is turning his guns on their own side. In remarks made to Conservative members in Kensington last month, James Cleverly also took pot-shots at Tory high command. ‘I’ve been the minister responsible for MI5, MI6, GCHQ and CCHQ,’ he said, to laughs. ‘And of those four institutions, I know which one needs the biggest overhaul’. He went on to say to members that they must ‘share my frustration that the London Conservative machine is not firing on all cylinders in a way that [the] Labour London machine is a really well-organised institution’, he said, before admitting that ‘Scottish Labour is a tighter organisation than Scottish Conservatives, Welsh Labour is a tighter organisation than Welsh Conservatives.’
On the digital front, Cleverly said that ‘we need to make sure our digital campaigning is much, much, much, much better. We got totally outclassed in the digital realm by Reform, a party that didn’t exist two and a half years ago’. Has anyone got a good word to say about CCHQ….?
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