The use of US-style open primaries could be an election winner for the Tories, writes Chris Game .
David Cameron just might have found it – his electoral holy grail, the Conservative equivalent of Tony Blair’s famous “Clause 4 moment” at the 1994 Labour Conference.
In announcing the abandonment of Labour’s constitutional commitment to nationalisation, Blair horrified much of his own party, but persuaded enough “swing” voters that Old Labour really had changed and at last, as New Labour, was safely electable.
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With the resolve of an Arthurian knight, Cameron has sought the policy grail that will convince us that his “nasty party” is similarly and irreversibly transformed. National minimum wage – accepted; Scottish and Welsh devolution – accepted; new grammar schools – rejected.
But, like Blair in 1994, Cameron is Opposition Leader, and policy pledges are ultimately just easy words that may or may not materialise. About all that Opposition Leaders can do with immediate effect is reform their parties, which is what Cameron is attempting in the improbable revolutionary crucible of Totnes in South Devon.
You will recall Totnes’ current MP: the veteran Conservative with a conscience bypass, Sir Anthony Steen. He was persuaded by incensed constituents and an irate Cameron to stand down following the revelation of his expenses – and did so with a memorable lack of remorse.
He didn’t precisely claim that the £87,700 for maintaining his country home – including tree surgery and rabbit protection – was all absolutely vital for the proper performance of his parliamentary duties. But he had, he insisted, behaved “impeccably”. It was his constituents’ jealousy and the Freedom of Information Act that were to blame.
As he explained to Radio 4’s The World at One, “You know what it’s about? Jealousy. I’ve got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It’s not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely.”
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By chance, Totnes is the only recently vacated Conservative constituency that is selecting its new candidate over the summer, and the ever-opportunistic Cameron has seized the moment. Desperate to implant a more progressive party image in voters’ minds, he decided that Totnes Conservatives would make history by being the first British party to use an all-postal ballot of an entire constituency to select a parliamentary candidate.
Every Totnes elector – including, if they wish, diehard anti-Conservatives – can thus vote to choose the party’s candidate at the next election: a different, or different type of, candidate perhaps than party members alone might have picked. All 69,000 voters have received ballot papers, freepost return envelopes, and a result is promised later today or tomorrow.
It is being called a “US-style open primary” – primaries being American shorthand for nominating primary elections, which are one of the ways in which parties in some states select their candidates for general or Presidential elections.
There are three basic types of primary, the first being the straightforward party meeting or caucus. It is an internal party body, usually comprising only party officers or delegates – like the General Management Committee (Labour) and Executive Council (Conservative) that traditionally finalised our own main parties’ selection of constituency parliamentary candidates.
Second is the system that in Britain has largely replaced the party caucus: the membership or closed primary election. Here the candidate is chosen from a shortlist in a vote that is open to all registered constituency party members – either at a meeting, or through a full membership ballot – but closed to non-members. Conservatives were again the innovators, experimenting with “closed primaries” long before Cameron was even born.
The first was back in 1949 in Hamstead, whose Conservative Constituency Association boasted then an almost incredible 7,500 members. More than 1,250 voted in a run-off vote between the sitting MP and the eventual winner, the future Home Secretary, Henry Brooke. Several similar “closed” primaries were subsequently held, including Geoffrey Howe’s selection in Reigate in 1968.
Which brings us to the third type of primary – the open primary – in which all registered voters in a constituency, including members of other parties or of no party, can participate. Less widespread than closed primaries, they are nevertheless used in about half of the American states.
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Usually in the US, registered voters are restricted to voting in just one party’s primary, but in recent years the Conservatives have promoted what might be termed the unrestricted open primary – a selection meeting to which all constituency voters are invited – as one of the approved procedures for choosing the party’s parliamentary candidates.
Nuneaton Conservatives, for example, chose Simon Rouse as their prospective parliamentary candidate at an open primary, and last year, following his resignation for family reasons, his successor, Marcus Jones, was selected by the same method.
More famously, Boris Johnson was chosen, overwhelmingly, as the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate in an open primary, more than 20,000 electors investing about £1.50 to call a premium rate phone line in order to record their votes. Things can, of course, go wrong. First, there is the risk of “raiding” – another party’s supporters voting in force for what they see as the weakest candidate. Secondly, as happened recently in Bethnal Green and Bow, party members can refuse to endorse the candidate chosen by the open meeting, which embarrassingly undermines the whole point of the exercise.
Cameron, though, is committed to open primaries, and this is what he has offered Totnesians, the historic first being the postal ballot that opens the offer to all voters, rather than those motivated enough to attend a selection meeting.
Purists complain that a choice of just three candidates, whittled down from some 100 applicants by Constituency Association officials, is a rather limited definition of “openness”. But in electoral terminology, its use is perfectly acceptable, and you can bet reformers in the other main parties are looking on with a mixture of envy and concern.
They will envy, for a start, Cameron’s ability to afford a constituency-wide postal ballot costing, surely, at least £40,000. Multiply that by even half the seats in the House of Commons (325 of the 650) and you’re up to £13 million, which no British party could remotely contemplate.
US primaries are partly financed through the federal government “matching” the candidates’ campaign contributions. But the current appetite here for any public funding of what are essentially internal party elections must be way below zero.
However, suppose Cameron’s calculation is that just a handful of these open primaries in key marginal constituencies in the run-up to the election could help persuade voters that the Tories really are a changed and modernised party, selecting different kinds of prospective MPs in a radically different way. With the winning candidates starting with the advantage of having already won a constituency-wide election, that could easily be judged a worthwhile investment.
The non-financial implications of open primaries are more profound still, for they challenge our whole party-based system of representation. What is the future of parties if, with outsiders selecting their candidates, they lose their fundamental role as associations for the furtherance of members’ shared values and beliefs? If all parties selected candidates in open primaries, how could elections present voters with a choice of competing sets of ideals and policies?
I just wonder if, in grabbing this chance of a short-term victory, David Cameron might have given us a glimpse of a potential democratic revolution, and, if so, is it one he would actually welcome?
* Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham.