I have written an article for today's Independent about the Liz Truss business. They cut nearly one-third of my text for the newspaper. The full, original article is pasted below.
"The most important thing that happens today is that Liz Truss is confirmed as the Conservative candidate for South West Norfolk. Liz is exactly the kind of MP who will enrich the House of Commons. She is intelligent and an independent thinker. She doesn’t come from a conventional Tory background but is nonetheless a champion of grassroots Conservatives and their beliefs. I hate to think how many good people have been discouraged from political service because of the intrusive public examination that she has had to put up with over recent weeks.
The second most important thing is that Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) learns the correct lessons from the whole unhappy saga. Blaming sexism and some unforgiving moralism will not do. Many Tory members don’t like adultery and no civilised society should. But the saga is more complex than grassroots traditionalism.
Members of all mainstream parties have fewer and fewer rights in our increasingly centralised political system. For Conservative Party members new rules have prevented them from deselecting Europhile MEPs. The members’ magazine has been scrapped. Attending party conference has become more expensive since these annual gatherings were moved from affordable seaside resorts to England’s big cities. Michael Howard even mounted an unsuccessful bid to end members’ right to choose the party leader.
The right to select the local parliamentary candidate is one of the last rights available to a Tory member. Associations have been bullied in countless ways by a party headquarters eager to hit artificial targets for the proportion of female candidates. Selecting more women MPs is an important aim but it would also be useful if the next parliamentary Conservative Party included more mathematicians and scientists, more people who have run poverty-fighting charities and fewer lifetime politicians who never worked outside the Westminster village. That would be real and deep diversity.
Conservatives in SW Norfolk are not the only Association to have rebelled against micro-management from the centre and they won’t be the last if, in the new year, CCHQ imposes inappropriately narrow shortlists. David Cameron has rowed back from his proposal for all women shortlists after a grassroots furore. He is now saying that any all women shortlists will emerge naturally rather than by design.
Grassroots Tories sometimes get a raw deal from party high-ups and from the media. In reality they have been adopting female candidates in almost exactly the same proportion (30%) as CCHQ have been able to recruit women for the overall candidates list.
If the Conservatives win the next election there should be at least sixty women Tory MPs. They are of high calibre too. A good number of gay and ethnic minority candidates are also being adopted by the Conservative heartlands – challenging the caricature of the average Tory member.
Trust the people is a great Conservative belief. If Team Cameron trusted the Tory membership in candidate selection they wouldn’t always get the candidate they wanted but it would be a good sign that they were serious about their commitment to localism."
