Not your ordinary, everyday Tory selection contest in Stratford-on-Avon

Last Friday (as I write) I chaired the meeting to select a prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for the constituency of Stratford-on-Avon. I say ‘chaired’ but the modern term is (I learned) ‘mediated’. My preference for the more old-fashioned verb will have been shared by almost all the assembled ranks of the Stratford-on-Avon Conservative Association: we were — very few of us, they or I — in the first flush of youth. We don’t do ‘mediated’.

But around 300 of them came (the selection was open only to party members) on a freezing Warwickshire night, for a meeting that would last from seven until around midnight. Some had brought Tupperware containers of sandwiches to help them through a long evening on utility chairs in a cavernous school hall. There were two comfort breaks, and tea. Mass-membership party-political participation may be dying in England, but it is not dead yet.

The meeting was presented with six hopefuls to choose from. ‘Presented’ is the right word because, so close to a general election, the central party machine is allowed to parachute in its preferred applicants, and Stratford’s sitting Member, John Maples, had not announced his intention to stand down until after Christmas.

I had the impression that some in the Association had been disappointed not to have more say over the shortlist, and that there had been a bit of to-ing and fro-ing between the central and the local party. The outcome was that party members were given a ten-minute opportunity with each hopeful to ask unmediated questions, off-the-cuff, from the floor, in addition to the pre-submitted questions from which my own interview-questions were loosely drawn; and that each hopeful would make a short, five-minute introductory speech (as the Association would never have heard a proper speech from any of them). Each hopeful had, in addition, to answer two set questions at the end, with a one-word answer: would the hopeful, if selected, come to live in the constituency, yes or no? And how would the hopeful, if selected, vote in a Commons division to legalise fox-hunting, for or against? It’s good to know that they have their priorities right in Stratford-on-Avon.