Conservative party

134,000. That’s how many members the Conservative Party now has, according to Paul Goodman at ConservativeHome. Despite months of campaigning from the site, the only figure Conservative HQ would release is that 253,600 people voted for David Cameron as leader in 2005. Today’s number means that membership has nearly halved throughout Cameron’s eight-year term as party leader. Tracking the memberships of political parties is difficult, as they are under no obligation to release any details. The House of Commons Library released a paper in December last year, compiling all the figures they could find. From this, this is how memberships of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties has dropped

Apropos of the current issue’s excellent cover story (‘The End of the Party’) about the hollowed husks that are today’s party conferences, I spent Saturday at the 2nd Conservative Renewal conference in Windsor. It was an interesting day, not least because what was intended to be a genuinely open meeting, though dominated by Conservative party activists, was boycotted by the Conservative party’s own leadership. Organised by Adam Afriyie and the Windsor Conservative Association and sponsored by the Conservative Home website, the keynote speaker was the former President of the Czech Republic, Vacláv Klaus. Other speakers came from a broad range of the conservative grassroots movements including the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Migration Watch and

A rather irritable Paddy Ashdown has just told Andrew Neil that the Lib Democrats are ‘a left-wing party’ but that their next coalition would be determined by the voters. Ashdown, whose chairing the Lib Dem election campaign, claimed that it simply wasn’t accurate to say that Lib Dems had a preference for who they’d like as their coalition partner. This is, to put it mildly, a dubious statement and Ashdown did feel the need to concede that senior Lib Dems did have ‘private likes and dislikes’. But he claimed that this wouldn’t influence their decision about who to go into government with. Ashdown’s aggressive approach to this question is designed

The Lib Dem conference rally was never going to be the same without Sarah Teather and her comedy routine. With Teather persona non grata following her decision to step down, it was duly a much tamer affair. The only risqué jokes were about Lembit Opik being bitten in the nether regions by a sausage dog. But seeing as Lembit has infuriated party loyalists by again calling for Clegg to go, they got a laugh from the leadership. The message of the conference rally was that the Liberal Democrats are the party of jobs. Nick Clegg claimed that the Tories weren’t the party of jobs, but the party of fire at

Party conference season kicks off this weekend, but who is actually going? A ComRes poll out today suggests 38 per cent of Conservative backbenchers will be unlikely to attend their party’s annual gathering in Manchester. 14 per cent of Labour MPs have also stated they won’t be attending but thankfully for the Lib Dems, everyone polled said they would be probably or definitely be going: Why is this a particular problem for the Tories? In this week’s Spectator cover feature, Ross Clark examines the plight of all parties and their conferences. He argues the Conservative party is now more akin to a rural bus service: ‘The website ConservativeHome (which now

Toby Young has rattled some Labour cages by publicly mooting a bid for the Tory nomination for Hammersmith. ‘Z List Toryboy celebrity Toby Young wants to be an MP’ spins a Labour adviser Imran Ahmed. Then came the hammer blow: ‘Think he’s gotten House of Commons mixed up with Big Brother house.’ Oh, that one will hurt. Should have saved it for the leaflets! So who is Ahmed? Well he last hit the headlines after he was accused of ghost-writing tweets for his old boss Andy Slaughter – the Labour MP for Hammersmith. Could he be speaking with Slaughter’s voice again?

William Hague’s appearance at the 1922 Committee has underlined the fact that the Tory party is now split on foreign policy. I’m told that the questions that the Foreign Secretary received were pretty much evenly split between the passionate supporters of intervention in Syria and its passionate opponents. Those present calculate that the room was evenly split between the two factions. Hague, I understand, made a robust case for why Britain needs to remain an outward looking nation that is prepared to use its military forces. But he did say, when asked, that ‘lessons will be learned’ from how the Syria vote was handled. This answer will fuel Westminster speculation

There’ll be no second parliamentary vote on Syria, George Osborne stressed this morning. There had been speculation that following President Obama’s decision to go to Congress before using military force, meaning that strikes won’t happen before the week of the 9th of September, there could be a second parliamentary vote on UK military involvement. But Osborne scotched that idea on the Andrew Marr show this morning. listen to ‘Osborne – No second Syria vote’ on Audioboo Obama’s decision, though, has eased the political pressure on David Cameron. Judging by some of the coverage this morning, he’s not a bungling leader who couldn’t get his way with his own parliament, but

To be fair to David Cameron, he’s not the only leader who’s performed a volte-face in the past 24 hours. If you’d listened to Ed Miliband yesterday afternoon, you might have been forgiven for thinking that he was quite likely to support the government’s motion on Syria, so long as it was and ‘legal’ and had specific and limited aims. listen to ‘Ed Miliband: Labour would consider supporting limited action in Syria’ on Audioboo