Newspapers report Conservative membership figures

By Peter Hoskin
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Following ConservativeHome’s own demands for official party membership figures from CCHQ, both the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times have sifted through constituency accounts to produce some numbers of their own. For the records, here are some of the key points from both papers’ reports, although it’s worth reading them in full. The Daily Telegraph first:

• “MPs now openly admit they may have fallen below 100,000 for the first time in post-war history.”
• “In Milton Keynes, where two Conservative MPs have seats, the number of full party members has fallen from 520 in 2010 to 264 in 2012.”
• “In Peterborough, where the Tory MP Stewart Jackson has a majority of 4,861, party membership has fallen from 264 two years ago to 140.”
• “In Bedford, where Richard Fuller has a majority of 1,353, membership has slipped from around 300 to 213 in two years.”
• “In the safe seat of Rugby, members have fallen from 194 to 155.”

And the Sunday Times (£):

• “The scale of the collapse in Tory membership has been revealed by data showing that up to half the activists in some cabinet ministers’ seats have deserted the party since the election.”
• “The worst-affected cabinet member is Pickles, whose Brentwood and Ongar constituency posted a 49.3% fall in membership between 2009 and 2012.”
• “Villiers, MP for Chipping Barnet, saw her membership numbers plummet 43.9% from 787 in 2009 to 441 in 2012.”
• “In the Chingford and Woodford Green constituency of Duncan Smith, numbers fell by 37% between 2009 and 2012.”
• “In the Basingstoke constituency of Maria Miller, the culture secretary, who oversaw the gay marriage legislation, just 259 members remained at the end of 2011, compared with 339 before the election, a fall of 22.7%.”
• “Only David Cameron and William Hague, the foreign secretary, have bucked the trend for steep declines in ministers’ seats. Both have seen drops of less than 2%.”