Fiona Melville

11th Mar 2011

There’s a report today of a legislative change to allow candidates to stand for two parties.  While it’s ostensibly to make it easier for Labour-Co-op candidates (who seem to manage fine at the moment),  it will inevitably be seen as a back-door attempt to smuggle in joint PPCs for the Con-Lib Coalition. Which is fine by me – but the non-public nature of the change is a bit concerning…

Strangely, in the last few days, I’ve talked several times about the way the A-list was handled in 2006. Just to recap – when David Cameron was elected leader, he introduced a top 100 (ish – I think there were more than that) of more diverse candidates who we as a party thought were our brightest and best. We would require constituencies to select from the top candidates to ensure that more women and minority candidates were selected, and to ensure that we got the best people into the most winnable seats.

Let’s leave aside whether or not it should have been done, that’s not why I mention it. I think in setting up a top candidates list, we should have been proud to make it public, and to promote those candidates in the media and locally as our top people who we thought would be great MPs. But for some still misty reason, it was decided that we would not be allowed to confirm or deny who was on that list. Internally we argued against it; but someone somewhere decided not to – I still don’t know who, but more importantly I still don’t know why. It was almost immediately made public anyway, and CCHQ was on the backfoot, defending against accusations of double-standards.

In more recent times, I was very impressed by the Lib Dems’ way of approving the initial Coalition Agreement – they had an internal MPs’ meeting, a Federal Policy Committee meeting, and a special conference of members, all of which approved the Agreement resoundingly. We as Conservatives had none of that. I’ve argued before that the Lib Dem process has given a great deal of cover to their leadership, and that we should have had something – yes, it probably would have ended up as a bit of a Built to Last/Pravda-like nodding through, but it would still have given a seal of approval.

I’ve written before about how I think that the AV referendum (whatever you think of the merits of the argument) is addressing the wrong problems in our democracy, and about how I would very much like the great ideas of Douglas Carswell et al on open primaries and recalls to be properly implemented.

This weekend in Cardiff I talked with four others, all of whom I would describe as being on the liberal end of the party, about recent political events (rather than governing and policy). Even amongst us, we disagreed 3 to 2 on whether we should have put up a Coalition candidates in the two recent by-elections (for the record, again, I think we should have done).

The real problem is the lack of openness on the part of the Party in all of these situations. I don’t think it’s necessarily a wilful desire to trick people; I think it might just be that institutionally, the party hasn’t yet caught up properly with the public mood and demand for transparency and accountability. I think as a government, we’re talking a great game on transparency and local control and so on, and I think that Francis Maude’s Cabinet Office is delivering. But I worry that we might not be quite there internally – which for the sake of politics really should change.