PCC results shows the Conservatives need better candidate selection

Cllr Sam Chapman, the Editor of TopOfTheCops.com and a Lancashire County Councillor, says the Conservatives suffered in the PCC elections by having cliques choosing candidates. Selections need to be fair, open and encourage as many as possible to take part

This week, in the elections for the flagship Police and Crime Commissioner policy, the Conservative Party failed to win in Surrey. Yes, you read that right, the Conservatives lost in Surrey. And the party had a good, credible, experienced and pleasant candidate in the form of Julie Iles, but still lost. Technically the party could blame the voting system except they lead the Government that chose it and, even on first preference votes, Iles was only a fraction ahead of the eventual winner, Independent and former Chief Superintendent Kevin Hurley.

The woes in Surrey were repeated in Hampshire, yes Hampshire, where Michael Mates lost to Simon Hayes, another Independent and former Conservative Police Authority chairman. In Norfolk it happened again, as Conservative candidate Jamie Athill was beaten by another former Conservative Police Authority chairman.

What all these contests have in common is that the local Conservative selection processes were felt by some to be so unsatisfactory that the official candidate could not be supported and these elections turned into unofficial primary elections, where voters used their first and supplementary votes not merely to choose a Conservative, but to choose what type of Conservative they wanted, and in all three cases it was the alienated ex-Conservative who was chosen.

In Surrey's case, the party had neglected to shortlist Hurley. In Norfolk, Betts had been shortlisted but rejected after a tally of votes from those who attended either of the two selection meetings. In Hampshire a substantial body of members simply could not believe that 78-year old Mates, hardly helped by the simultaneous trial and conviction of Asil Nadir, could have been picked by the party.

Losing three of what should be 'safe' PCC areas this way was incomprehensible, but the damage was not limited to those. In Dorset, Nick King lost to Independent Martyn Underhill. The latter is no Tory but, in the last weeks of the campaign, allegations surfaced and were published about King's business history. The telling point was not the content of the allegations, which failed to excite most to whom they were sent, but the way they were written, suggesting they came from a Conservative unhappy at the selection.

In the West Midlands, the Conservative candidate took a disappointing 18.5% of the first preferences, compared with Labour's 42%, after a Conservative selection process that resulted in so many complaints that the party had to establish an internal investigation.

I write this, possibly especially aware of difficulties with selections, having been the runner-up for the Conservative nomination in Lancashire. On Friday I watched one former police officer after another receive a boost in the polls, as had been predicted by three separate pieces of research, and wondered whether the results in Lancashire, the West Midlands and Surrey would have been different if the party had organised a fair consideration of the candidates with police experience that had been offered to them.

Having run a website covering these elections for nine months I have received report after report from these areas and others showing a depth and breadth of concern about selection processes that I have never seen before. The irony is that there were numerous faults in Labour's selection processes, but the Conservatives could not make the most of these as our's were little better.

The PCC elections have been marred by a failure to engage large sections of the electorate at the ballot box, but this itself is built on another failure, the failure to engage meaningful amounts of either the party or the electorate in the choice of candidates. If we cannot engage anything more than a tiny fraction of our own members in choosing candidates, what chance is there that we can motivate those members to enthuse the population at large?

We know that proper, informed postal ballots of members can engage them in candidate selection. We know that full open primaries, not the pale imitation used in many areas, can secure the involvement of the electorate. Yet we continue to think it acceptable to make selections based on how many supporters a tiny number of candidates can pack into a room at one end of a county, without equal treatment of those candidates. By doing this we have lost several of these elections, and the momentum they could have created for other victories.