Why not let the MPs choose their man, then give ordinary Tories the right of veto?

Much nonsense is being written about new ways for the Conservative party to choose its leader. The plan being floated — that MPs might offer constituency chairmen a shortlist to choose from — is absurd. It would have produced Iain Duncan Smith. Everybody can guess who the five would be this time, but one or two stand little chance of winning their colleagues’ hearts.

No membership rebellion is brewing, but journalists need stories. ‘No big problem about change of Tory leadership rules’ is not a story; but it is never difficult for a reporter seeking more interesting news to locate a local association chairman here, or an exceptionally zealous activist there, prepared to declare that ordinary members will not give up their powers without a fight.

But they will. They never particularly wanted them in the first place. If the status quo were that the ordinary membership had no role at all in selecting a leader, there would not be a popular movement now to acquire one. Involvement in the selection of leader was thrust upon the membership by the leadership. I know a popular uprising when I see one, and no such thing precipitated the Hague reforms. Indeed it could be said that the leadership rose up against itself to diminish its own powers.

The membership deferred politely to those plans, and will defer politely to whatever replaces them. But journalists have come to believe their own caricature of the Tory membership, and it is this that has misled them into predicting any other response. Tory ‘activists’ exist but most ordinary members are not activists. ‘Matrons’ with ‘blue rinses’ exist but most Conservative women are quite unlike that. On the whole the women are more moderate and thoughtful (and more numerous and more active) than the men.

It is true that the Tory membership is markedly older, whiter and more middle-class than your average Briton; and true that they are rather — I say ‘rather’, not ‘much’ — more right-wing than the average voter, and that many (by no means all) of them are rather more Eurosceptical than the average.