GROUCHO Marx’s disinclination to join any club which would accept him suggests a corollary that Groucho never mentioned: the club anxious to recruit just the sort of people who would not dream of joining. The Tories may be headed that way, and if they are not they should be. For its parliamentary candidates, the principal opposition should be actively seeking men and women who can show a clean record of non-involvement with the party. As their mass membership dwindles to a residue of the elderly, the sweet, the bored, the sad, the lonely, the obsessive and the mad, the point is being approached when proof of previous enthusiasm for the Conservative party ought to count against an applicant for inclusion on Conservative Central Office’s approved list of would-be parliamentary candidates.
I am neither joking nor directing this exclusively at the Tories. The problem is more urgent for them because a long period of unpopularity has sharpened their dilemma, but all mainstream parties are heading the same way. When looking for prospective members of either House, any serious modern political party in Britain should, with varying degrees of urgency, consider casting its net outside, and especially outside, its own ranks.
I write in Bournemouth. Behind me lie some 25 years of attending party conferences. Both in their present appearance and in the way they are changing, our two main parties have much in common when viewed at the seaside. They are both getting older, they are both getting smaller, and less and less can any British party boast a representative sample of the population whose votes they aim to attract.
This would matter less if, though unrepresentative, party memberships contained a core of high-calibre people well-placed to play a useful role in government or opposition.
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