From Mr Michael Brown Sir: Bruce Anderson makes some nostalgic
remarks about the former methods used to select Conservative parliamentary candidates. I should like to point out that I was one of those who had a chat with Sir Anthony Grant, then party vice-chairman, and was then excluded from joining the official candidates lists because I refused to support Sir Edward Heath's misguided incomes policy. Paradoxically, I succeeded in getting elected as one of 'the 1979 intake of Tory MPs, one of the best vintages of all time', albeit not as an approved candidate, when I captured the safe Labour seat of Brigg & Scunthorpe.
Thanks a lot for the compliment, Bruce, but my example demonstrates how the informal system of backroom chats was often abused. Indeed, it helped to perpetuate the rather self-regarding Oxbridge clique who typified the party's candidates during the postwar era.
At the end of the day, moreover, people like Shaun Woodward, George Walden, et al. only became Conservative MPs after having been selected by local constituency parties. Should we therefore deprive voluntary party members of their traditional right to choose their parliamentary candidates too? Michael Brown
London SW1
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