Gerald Jones is a pseudonym.
Whenever I talk with German business colleagues, they wax lyrical about the new big thing coming out of the Reichschancellery: picking winners. The next in-thing is a push for Champions of Business, which as it happens always means swanky companies with friends in high places.
The country that created Erhard, Europe’s greatest economics minister of the twentieth century, is sinking sadly to Gallic practises. That doesn’t mean to say, however, that we have to.
Winners aren’t made, or at least, it happens so rarely that the billions usually thrown at such a biological experiment in business makes for poor value for money. Winners emerge. They evolve. Often they ultimately fail as the conditions around them change, and the winning conditions within the business fade and disappear, sometimes at the same time as the founder.
Which makes it all the more surprising that the Conservative Party seems to be picking this approach for choosing its candidates. For years you operated as a free market, so that you could get individuals of varied talents and very varied ideas popping up all over the country. You only have to look at the colourful characters of the 1980’s to recognise that the Party was operating as a form of social experiment. But the key thing was, it worked.
It worked because the associations were given the freedom to choose who they thought best represented them. Social Darwinism did the rest. It meant that the Party contained a decent cross section of political ideas. True, there may have been a shortage of, say, nurses who got selected. But there was at least a range of different shades of Conservatism down there in Westminster, from the pinkish to the Caribbean or Ocean blues.
That, I fear, is about to change. The A List isn’t just about making the Party more representative. It’s about pushing an agenda. It’s about picking winners, Frankfurt style. The problem with that is you end up with the same very limited spectrum as the pickers have.
Francis Maude has gone on record in the press saying that he wants to keep the Conservative Party as an alliance of interests – a sort of Venn diagram of politics, maybe. But the real danger from the A List (which will be sorted out in the space of the next couple of months, let’s remember) is the lilacisation of Conservatism. No wonder people like Norman Tebbit are concerned: they fear that the spectrum will fade and one ideology will predominate. Even under Thatcherism a thousand blossoms bloomed.
If this change happens, Cameron’s honeymoon will turn into a bunny boiling nightmare. I fear many wannabe candidates will feel that their loyalty is no longer recognised. MPs and peers who empathised more with other leadership candidates may feel that their allegiance to the new order is being ground into the carpet. Handled badly, it would be a premature spark to a period of disquiet and even open policy flash revolt.
That’s if it’s handled badly. Handled well, on the other hand, Cameron could take the opportunity to demonstrate that his Party really is a broad alliance, where people are encouraged to bring their skills and beliefs to the table, for the best to be picked out. But to do that, the A List can’t be Maude’s mauve. It can’t be just Dave’s Dolls. It has to include all wings.
ConservativeHome has done a great service in this. Mr Montgomerie’s Gold List has cast the spotlight on a number of people who could and should be seriously considered for the superlist. I have met or have heard several of them talk. Danny Kruger is an accomplished speaker and possesses a rare intellect and sound judgement. Adrian Hilton is an outstanding thinker and has shown integrity that Westminster needs in spades. Lee Rotherham’s work in Brussels has saved British businesses millions of pounds, and I take my hat off to anyone who has both been shot at by insurgents in Iraq as well as co-written a popular hit book that’s gotten Gordon Brown ruffled.
There are others who should be there as well. I say it’s time to put something in writing for the Candidates people to see. It’s time for people who belong to the high-tax-hating, Eurosceptic, and traditionalist wings to put forward our own List of Winners, and say these are the people we want. We have to push a “C21” List of maybe twenty one candidates as nominees who represent what we want out of the modern party, based on this website’s gold list.
Then maybe, when the selection process finally gets under way in my association, I will have at least a handful of names out there I can look at and say they represent my part in the Conservative spectrum, and feel as if I belong.
BECAUSE ALL COMMENTS TO THE GOLDLIST BLOG HAVE TO BE APPROVED, THERE WILL BE A DELAY BETWEEN MAKING A COMMENT AND IT APPEARING.
