Via the News of the World:
Secret party documents show 40,000 supporters have left since David Cameron took over as leader three years ago.
And the slump has ACCELERATED over the past year with the constituencies of Shadow Cabinet members among the worst hit.
The ageing membership is dying off and the party is failing to attract youngsters.
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has lost an incredible 240 members in the last three years. Osborne—rocked by the Yachtgate scandal over his alleged talks with a Russian billionaire about a possible party donation—lost 69 constituency members in the past year.
Also badly affected is Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague, whose constituency membership fell by 267 in just one year.
Overall, Tory Party membership has fallen from 290,000 to 250,000 in the three years since Cameron took over.
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12 Comments
Well, I think we also haemorraged around 10,000 members between Charles Kennedy and Ming Campbell’s resignations, but the Tories seem to be stuck in the mud at the moment, hoping that the tide will come in for them whilst not doing very much about it….
It’s a minor point but in what sense are these party documents “secret”, as you describe them?
Just because it says so in the News of the World doesn’t make it true, as I thought we would all be aware of by now.
In fact the News of the World story is based on individual Conservative constituency parties’ reports to the Electoral Commission. Not only are these not secret, they are available publicly online at the Electoral Commission website.
The substantive point about the decline in Tory membership in many of the seats which they hold currently is, of course, true. (And hooray for that I say).
Has this blog nothing better to discuss than tittle-tattle about the Tories? God you people are pathetic.
Just for comparison, I wonder how the Lib Dem membership has developed?
Andy: although some of the figures in the story are in public sources, not all of them are (as far as I’m aware). So the reference to an internal / secret document looks to me genuine.
Old Hack: you could always look at the 50+ posts betweeen the two occasions when you’ve made that comment, and you’ll find posts on a wide range of other topics 🙂
Andy,
FYI…Conservative Home asked for CCHQ to give them membership data but they declined so I would definatly imagine they are ‘secret’ in that sense. Con Home also speculates that they are based on returns from individual associations to the election commission….
“Just for comparison, I wonder how the Lib Dem membership has developed?”
Over the 11 months following the election of Nick Clegg, Lib Dem membership dropped by 400 a month on average.
That’s considerably less than the rate at which Tory membership has been falling according to the numbers above, though considerably more when expressed as a percentage of total membership.
It may be a source of a cheap raspberry blowing at the Tories but doesn’t this statistic – which means little without comparable figures for Labour and the Dems as well – suggest a wider dissatisfaction with all the parties? That surely is a cause for concern rather than crowing.
My calculator says 290000 to 250000 is a fall of 13.7% over the 3 years. The best comparison for the Lib Dems would be the number of Leadership ballot papers issued for the January/March 2006 election and the October/November 2008 Presidential election. This would cover about 2 years 9 months of the 3 year tory period.
I’d bet a fiver for the Christmas Church collection plate that our percentage fall is very similar and almost certainly worse.
So yes it is just rasberry blowing and adds nothing to the wider debate about Traditional political party’s are slowing collapsing.
Hat Tip to the Colin Rosenthal family site. Assuming that the figures are accurate then then there were 72064 ballots issued in the 2006 Leadership Election and 60357 in the 2008 Presidential Election. I make that a fall of 16.3% so yes the decline is actually steeper than the Tory one in a very similar time frame,
Whats facinating is the longer term figures 80104 ballots issued in the 1988 Election which was up a smigen 11 years later to 82827 members in the 1999 election. then the decline set in but consider the following comparision.
A decline of just over 10k to 72064 in the 2006 Election but that is nearly 6 years. Then a decline of over 11k to 60357 just 20 months later.
Seems the party memberships overall are shrinking in line with the Labour (‘lets have a party’) mismanagement of every aspect of our economy and society!…NuLab. membership is now a third of what it was in 1997 (down to 160,000 or so and falling)…seems they are as intent on bankrupting the country as fast as their party are going bust!…their revenge on the British public for not supporting them is clear!!!
About 3 years ago the Conservatives put up their minimum membership to £25. At the time there were a lot of Conservative associations that had special private deals for long standing OAP members where they got a minimal annual subscription (say £2) so that their membership stood at a loss, although typically the same members would go to several social events so that they might contribute £50-£60. The Tory party could count extra members and the hard up pensioners effectively got the social events on the cheap. The changes a few years a go stopped all of this , and I suspect that many of those elderly members will have given up their membership but kept up their social activities. It wouldn’t explain all the decrease, but it would explain quite a lot of it.