Political Commentary
Picking and Choosing
By DAVID WATT
A PART from his celebrated apercu on the sub- ject off his old chum Selwyn Lloyd's fitness for high office, the passage of Lord Kihnuir's memoirs which has caused most political com- ment is that in which he discusses his Maxwell Fyfe report of 1948 on Conservative Party organi- sation. There is nothing intrinsically implausible in saying, as Mr. Angus Maude implied in a review in these pages last week, that Lord Kilmuir is incapable even of understanding the significance of his own reforms. But it must be admitted that Lord Kilmuir's main thesis has a good deal of support in the party hierarchy.
The argument is this. Until 1948 the system pre- vailed whereby Conservative parliamentary can- didates were expected to dig into their pockets for their own election expenses and often for the wages of the agent and the upkeep of the local. Conservative Association's offices as well. In the days when he was in the habit of making ritual descents on the Carlton Club Mr. Macmillan was fond of regaling younger members with an account of a selection committee he attended in the Twenties at which the chairman simply asked each applicant to write his name on a piece of paper together with the amount he was prepared to donate to the Association's funds. The highest bidder was adopted forthwith. Kilmuir argues that the abolition of this kind of auction and the removal of the entire burden of expenses from the back of the candidate was obviously right, but that it has had some dubious consequences. As things now• stand, local associations have an almost completely free hand in choosing the man they like, and, because they don't depend on him for cash, in keeping him in line and eventually sacking him if he is sufficiently troublesome. Thus he claims that the party has 'virtually abro- gated its control over the selection of parliamen- tary candidates,' and that this control should be restored.
Stated in that form this thesis is naturally not heartily endorsed by the '55 and '59 entry, but even they have suffered sufficient indignities under the current system to have a good deal of blind sympathy for change. Present Conservative arrangements are these. A budding statesman writes to the Vice-Chairman of the Party announcing his ambitions. He is interviewed by the Vice-Chairman in person (at present a genial farmer of the 1955 vintage, Mr. Paul Bryan) and by a distinctly dim panel of safe Tory MPs. His name and qualifications then go before the party's standing advisory committee on candidates, a star-studded band containing the heads of all the Party organisations and the Chief Whip, and if approved by them the name is added to the list of official candidates. This looks on paper like a formidable process, but in fact any man who is a Conservative of even moderate education or a chievement will almost inevitably pass unless he Is hopelessly young, inexperienced or uncouth. The fact that there are at present about 800 names on the list shows it is not wildly exclusive.
At this point, however, the going becomes rougher. Any aspirant on the official list is entitled !...0 have his name and qualifications put forward It he wishes for any constituency falling vacant and this rule is apparently carried out scrupulously by Central Office. Yet in the reduc- tion of perhaps thirty names to a dozen to be interviewed, the advice of the Party Vice-Chair- man to the local bigwigs is inevitably important
and works in at least a negative fashion. In addi- tion, the constituency association may have some favourite son, a local Tory luminary of some sort whom they insist on considering even if he is not on the candidates' list. At any rate, the field is somehow reduced by a selection committee to ten or a dozen possibles who are then reduced, after interview, to a short list of two or three. Another interview by the full local executive follows and their choice is finally adapted with acclamation by the whole association.
This is clearly a hazardous process. The ideal candidate, one would suppose, is between thirty and forty-five; married with two or three child- ren; had, if old enough, a 'good war'; fought one unsuccessful election (but not more); articulate and well turned out; successful (but not too suc- cessful) in some acceptable private line of business. It will help if he is not a Jew, a Catholic and does not look like a foreigner or a homo- sexual (the candidate's religion does not appear on his charge sheet 'but can be obtained' accord- ing to the Central Office handbook, `by applica- tion if required'). Beyond this, however, it is impossible to predict the whims of selection committees and executives who often take no trouble to judge the applicants on more than half an hour's acquaintance, and who have been known to ask the candidate's wife to turn round so that they can see how she looks from the back. Moreover, Kilmuir is clearly right in saying that it is a process over which the Central Office has precious little control. A favoured candidate like Peter Goldman of the Conservative Political Centre failed for years before getting his ill-fated nomination to Orpington. Central Office implored literally dozens of constituencies to accept Sir Edward Brown, a real live Tory trade unionist, before he was taken by Bath. Mr. Norman Collins, a valued Tory advisor on television, is still without a seat after many attempts. It often seems, in fact, that constituencies positively react against promptings from outside.
Comparisons are sometimes made by Tory hierarchs between this state of affairs and the
'socialist control' exercised by the Labour Party over its own selection processes. Alas, investiga- tion shows that this is a myth. The Labour Party, has, as usual, more precise rules and even more chaotic practice than its rivals. Democracy demands, in the first place, that aspirants wishing to be placed on the candidates' list must be nominated by the constituency to which they belong; it furthermore demands that if a seat falls vacant, any candidate wanting to be con- sidered by the local general committee must get himself formally nominated by one of the local wards or local Labour organisations. The final decision takes place at a full-dress election con- ference of the general committee whose member- ship, often more than 100 strong, is carefully alloted by rule to ward and trade union delegates according to the size of their membership and the amount they subscribe. It follows that to the normal built-in lunacy of all local political com- mittees of whatever party is added the possibility of large-scale political manoeuvre and lobbying.
Labour's procedure is further hopelessly com- plicated by the existence of a separate list of trade union sponsored candidates. In some industrial constituencies where there is a preponderance of unionists, one union, because of the weighting procedure, will be able to railroad its candidate— any candidate—through the selection conference, but there are also non-industrial constituencies where a trade union candidate will be picked because the local party needs the £300 a year plus election expenses which the union may be per- suaded to stump up; and there are other cases where unions adopt bright young intellectuals as candidates for the sake of their own prestige. This situation has, of course, been often criticised as tending to put too many seats in the hands of union bureaucrats, yet although it results in about one-third of Labour's seats being trade union sponsored at present, it is difficult to fault the system on grounds of democracy since in many industrial areas unions often fight each other for seats, and even where one is predominant (as the miners are in Durham) it seems natural enough that ordinary members should express their pre- ference for one of their own kind to represent them. But however one looks at it, it is clear that Transport House have very little look-in. Their intervention in practice amounts to restricting the number of Co-operative Society candidates to twenty-two and insisting on a final veto which they have occasionally (three times in the last five years) exercised against fellow-travellers and so on. Efforts to foist 'friends of the management' on to local parties are, as with the Conservatives, almost always disastrous.
What, then, is to be done? The more one looks at the problem the more one is forced to reply `nothing.' As a matter of fact it is difficult to com- pletely sustain Lord Kilmuir's assertion about the generations. The 1950 and 1951 intakes were admittedly outstanding for the Tory Party but this, after all, was the cream of the war and post- war generation which had been kept out by the vast Labour landslide of 1945. The post-1955 lot contains some competent Ministers such, as Sir Keith Joseph, Mr. Geoffrey Rippon, Mr. C. M. Woodhouse and Mr. Maurice Macmillan, not to mention almost all the younger back-benchers who are far more good than bad. On the Labour side, trade unions are now taking great pains with the training and selection of their own candidates and their age level is steadily dropping. The selec- tion system at present is apt, admittedly, to ex- clude anyone 'unusual,' far less eccentric, but there is no evidence that the intervention of the Central Office or Transport House would improve matters or produce a more representative Commons,
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