It would appear that none of the vacant Conservative seats in need of a candidate (currently ten, but likely to increase over coming days and weeks) is going to have that candidate in place until the party conference season in September or even October.
Eight seats have so far become vacant since the beginning of "Expenses-gate", and these are presumably the ones that David Cameron particularly had in mind when he announced just over a week ago that he was re-opening the candidates' list to all-comers. But with a torrent of applications having come in to the candidates' department, those applications now need to be processed and people put through assessment boards, which is clearly going to take some time, hence the delay in the selections until September.
However, two seats of the vacant seats - Woking and Skipton & Ripon - were preparing to select after the sitting MPs had announced their retirement a while back, but had been put on hold until the current elections were done and dusted. Indeed, I gather that both seats were intending advertising this Friday with a view to selecting by the end of June. Instead, they will not come up until September as well, which means that all those associations' well-laid plans for June have had to be postponed.
9am update: A trusted source informs me that the one exception to the delay in selections will be Totnes, where Anthony Steen is standing down. The association there is apparently due to select in July - a wise move, given that it is the most marginal of the vacant seats, with a new Tory candidate set to defend a notional majority of 2,693 over the Lib Dems. I gather the association there has decided to select via an open primary.
11.45am update: A correspondent from Woking has provided this update on the situation there in the comments section below, explaining that a final decision on whether or not to proceed with the selection this month will be made next week.
Jonathan Isaby
