Matthew Parris’s column in The Times today is a good counter-blast to the idea that all Tory backbenchers are craving more policies that are bolder. As Parris points out, many of those defending seats against Laboour don’t want that. Indeed, if you had left it to these MPs I very much doubt that the government would have cut the 50p tax rate. He is also right that the desire to remove David Cameron—as opposed to grumble about him—is extremely limited.
It is, though, as one senior MP pointed out to me earlier, worth noting that most Tory members of the Cabinet are in extremely safe seats. It is hard to imagine Witney going Labour, while Neil Hamilton had to be caught up in cash for questions before Tatton left the Tory fold.
But what the Tory party should worry about is not whether large majorities are skewing the views of some backbenchers but the atrophying of the local associations. I was struck at the last election by the observation of someone who had stood for the Tories in a Labour-held seat in 1997. He was called in to help in a selection in a Tory target marginal in 2010 and found that the association there was far smaller, far less active and far less representative than his had been in his no-hope seat in 1997.
Broadening the base of the membership, should be a priority for the Tories. This is, obviously, not easy given that Tory members have, unlike their Liberal Democrat counterparts, very little power and that this is a thoroughly anti-politics age. But as the Labour party’s experiment in Preston, reported in The Independent today, shows, it is possible.
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