I hope that Elizabeth Truss survives the campaign to deselect her. By all accounts she is an extremely able candidate who will be an asset to the party. But a number of the arguments put forward in her defence seem to me to be badly mistaken, and I want to explain why.
First, the suggestion that she would not face such pressure were she a man. Well, many a male politician forced to resign in disgrace would be surprised by that thought. And even in this Parliament men have been forced to resign as prospective Parliamentary candidates for the Conservative Party after it was alleged that they had affairs. And, at least until very recently, male candidates that had complicated family lives faced close scrutiny about their personal circumstances in selection meetings. Selection meetings took a dim view of you if they thought you had left your wife and children. It is simply false that only women candidates are objected to on the grounds of adultery.
Next many of those writing commentaries have claimed that the sexual conduct of politicians is irrelevant. Indeed, both Iain Dale and Louise Bagshawe have described the view that it is relevant as "neanderthal". As it happens, personally I would have little interest in whether my MP had committed adultery, but I would consider it relevant to the holding of high executive office (if you have a history of being a covenant-breaker or an oath-breaker in your marriage or the marriage of others, I think we should wonder how much you can be trusted with even greater responsibilities). But I doubt whether I would think it appropriate to refuse someone even high office on the grounds of a history of adultery - since at least a quarter of people and probably upwards of a half have engaged in behaviour I would regard as adulterous, I would struggle to have any high quality candidates to support for anything if I excluded all the adulterers! It is adultery's ubiquity that reduces its decisiveness as an issue for me, rather than any intrinsic irrelevance.
But even if I would not consider it relevant, is it really so illegitimate for other Conservatives to consider it relevant? First, candidate selection occurs by votes. Voting is an intrinsically subjective process. It is not, by any means, a device that we believe places the best people in the jobs for which they are most suited. People vote on the basis of all kinds of things I would consider, at best, only partially relevant. They are influenced by all kinds of character issues, impressed by odd things from your past that others consider irrelevant, upset that you worked for a tobacco company or an anti-hunting lobby-group or whatever, impressed/upset that you came from good breeding/were born with a silver spoon in your mouth (reverse the above for "came from a tough neighbourhood"), despised you as a coward/admired your strong stand because you resigned your commission in the Army over Iraq, are impressed by your intellect/assume you are other-worldy and unable to engage with ordinary people because you have a doctorate, and so on. Is it really so illegitimate for people to think it just as relevant as any of the above whether you betrayed your spouse or someone else's spouse?
Next, even if people might not consider an issue relevant for themselves, they might consider it relevant for voters at large. Any constituency with a group memory of the sexual scandals of the 1990s and the electoral consequences thereof might very well take the view that, even if enlightened Conservative Party members would be prepared to be tolerant and forgiving, voters in a General Election might not. Indeed, one of the very best arguments for favouring women candidates through devices such as the A list or all-women shortlists is that women candidates get, on average, more votes - and this is an argument that has actually been deployed by George Osborne, for example. Now perhaps on some issues we would not want to submit to voter approval even at the risk of losing the constituency. An example could be that we might insist that a member of an ethnic minority should be our candidate even in a constituency containing many racist voters. But even racial issues are complex. Would we really consider the outlook of wider voters irrelevant when considering the merits of a candidate of Palestinian extraction applying to stand in a largely Jewish constituency?
Perhaps even then. Perhaps even then. But, if so, that must be because we consider it morally illegitimate to disapprove of someone because of her race. But the same is surely not true of adultery. There are few moral issues on which society is still, at least theoretically, so united as in our notional view that adultery is wrong. Do we really think we would put forward a candidate that we believed would lose because of her history of adultery simply in order to "face down the voters" in saying that we thought they were wrong to disapprove of this?
The arguments above seem to me to be mis-directed. The key reasons Elizabeth Truss should not be deselected over this are surely (a) (and overwhelmingly the most importantly) because the matter was well-known at the time of her candidacy; and (b) the matter was some time ago (making it different, in fact, from certain of the male cases I referred to above) and now resolved and in the past. It is more common than readers unfamiliar with how these things work might suppose for the supporters of failed candidates for Parliamentary selection to leap upon opportunities to attempt to re-visit selection decisions. This is sufficiently silly and unjust when it concerns broadly irrelevant new issues that arise that really were unknown at the time of candidate selection (e.g. minor tax infringements or employment issues). It would be profoundly wrong for a candidate to be deselected on the basis of something that was a matter of public record at the time of the initial selection. If those involved in the selection meetings did not know about Ms Truss' history, they have no-one to blame but themselves, and the fact that she refused to allow her selection meeting to be distracted by choosing herself to dwell upon matters of past public record shows her resolute determination to move on, not any attempt at deceit (for who can be deceived by not having pointed out to them what they ought, anyway, to know?).
Should she be deselected? Certainly not. Should the Conservative Party central machine intervene to protect Elizabeth Truss? Well, would they intervene (and will they from hereon intervene) to protect male PPCs in similar difficulties? And if the centre intervenes in this way, what role do constituency associations and members really have in candidate selection? Therein lies a tricky web of problems that would require their own separate post.
