'There's no reason to join the Tories. We've come over as voracious, crass, always on the take' - Who says so? Dave's own constituency chairman

There's absolutely no reason to join the Conservative Party – and that’s according to David Cameron’s own constituency chairman, Christopher Shale.

In a strategy document seen by The Mail on Sunday, Mr Shale admits that at present there’s ‘no reason to join. Lots of reasons not to’.

The paper, of which Cameron is aware, presents a scathing assessment of the social skills and fundraising efforts of his association.

david cameron

Under Cameron¿s leadership Tory membership nationally appears to have fallen by about a third, from 259,000 to 177,000

In a sign of how hard the party is finding it to attract new members, the document concedes that the Prime Minister’s own association gained only 22 members in the past year.

Their response is ‘Operation Vanguard’, which is designed to achieve a ‘transformational increase in [West Oxfordshire Conservative Association] membership, in ways others can apply to similar effect nationally’.

The plan is brutally frank about the failings of the constituency party. Shale writes that ‘collectively we are not always an appealing proposition’.

He slams the association’s fundraising efforts, saying: ‘Over the years we have come across as graceless, voracious, crass, always on the take.’

He concludes that people don’t join because they ‘think we’ll beg and steal from them. And they’re right’.

In what will be seen by many in the party as classic evidence of Cameroon Tory self-loathing, Shale opines: ‘When we are together we are not always a group of people  to whom many of our potential members are going to be magnetically drawn.’

He goes on to warn: ‘When we come together as a group we sometimes morph into something different, less attractive. Our [West Oxfordshire Conservative Association] environment alters us.’

His solution is: ‘We must look different – when we communicate, when we’re together. We must sound different – in what we say, how we say it, the language we use, our tone of voice. We must behave differently – try to see ourselves as others see us.’

david Cameron

Journey: Reviving Conservative Party membership across the country is not going to be done by updating the coffee morning for the 21st Century or laying on special trips

Under Cameron’s leadership Tory membership nationally appears to have fallen by about a third, from 259,000 to 177,000. At the same time, local associations have seen their power to select candidates decline dramatically.

But Shale’s ideas for increasing membership have little to do with remedying this. Instead, quoting the Prime Minister’s director of political strategy Andrew Cooper – who is, as the chairman proudly notes, another resident of the constituency – Shale argues that offering potential members more politics would put them off.

He claims that the country can be divided into two groups, ‘politics heavy’ people and ‘politics light’ ones who aren’t interested in the subject except at General Elections. He calculates that 98 per cent of the population is ‘politics light’ and that ‘politics heavy is a big turn-off for politics light people’.

Shale likens changing the membership package away from political activity to what Cameron did to the national party: ‘It’s what, pre-2005, DC used to call double ham and eggs: We’ve offered them ham and eggs repeatedly. They don’t want it. So how can the solution possibly be double ham and eggs?’

Instead, under Shale’s strategy, ‘WOCA is, in effect, going into the event-management business’. He thinks that the association needs to offer events with ‘money-can’t-buy appeal’.

Even those occasions at the low end of the price scale reflect how well off Cameron’s constituency is. For instance, there is ‘The PMQ DIY Lunch: Bring your own sandwiches to watch PMQs in a different fine country house in the constituency (by courtesy of a PPC member) every week; glass of wine, cup of coffee, informal discussion, yours for a fiver.’ Most constituencies are lucky if they have one fine country house, let alone one for every week of the parliamentary year.

At the higher end, Shale muses about a trip to America, writing: ‘We might have Just Another Ordinary Day: We’ll organise it but choose how you get there, stay where you like for as long as you like and on one of the days breakfast briefing with a senior staffer, tour of the White House, lunch with a senator .  .  . yours for cost plus a £1,000 donation to WOCA.’

But reviving Conservative Party membership across the country is not going to be done by updating the coffee morning for the 21st Century or laying on special trips for them. Instead, it needs members to be given a real, substantive reason to sign up.

In the modern age, where people don’t join the Young Conservatives to meet a future spouse at a ball, they need to be given a political, not a social reason to become a member of the party. They need to be offered, at the very least, the chance to pick their own candidate and probably far more than that. How many more people would sign up as Tory members if it gave them a real chance to set party policy on tax?

The Cameroons argue that the membership is too small to make this a sensible move, that the result would be unrepresentative candidates and policies that were unsellable to the public. But unless the party in the country is given some real power, it will continue to wither away. If the Prime Minister’s own association can add only 20-odd members in the year its MP enters Downing Street, what hope is there for other local parties?

If the leadership are not prepared to trust their members with some real powers, then they are going to have to find a whole other way to organise the party. Otherwise, it is going to die under them.


Revealed: The horse trading that got us off the hook over another Greek bailout

German Chancellor Angela Merkel

True believer: German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she sees no danger of any eurozone country being forced to restructure its debt

Diplomatic poker is a hard game to play. But Downing Street has proved adept at it over the past few months as it tried to protect Britain from having to contribute to the European Union bailout of Greece.

Having had to provide loans for the EU’s rescue packages for Portugal and Ireland, the Government was aware that it would be taxing the public’s – and the Conservative Party’s – patience if it got dragged into another EU-led bailout. Lending the Greeks money would be particularly problematic because they are so unlikely to be able to pay it back. It would be throwing good money down the Acropolis.

To avoid being roped in to helping out the Greeks, the Government knew that it needed to square the EU’s big two –France and Germany.

The French were won round by a classic bit of horse-trading. Nicolas Sarkozy wants his finance minister, Christine Lagarde, to replace the disgraced Dominique Strauss-Khan at the International Monetary Fund.

But to achieve this, he will need London’s support. So Downing Street told the Elysee Palace that British backing for Lagarde was conditional on French backing on the bailout.

Turning the Germans was more complicated. But Cameron persuaded Angela Merkel to accept the British staying out by indicating that he would block the European Treaty change that she wants unless she acquiesced.

The final step was to get agreement from the EU President, the Belgian Herman Van Rompuy. This George Osborne did at the annual meeting of the secretive Bilderberg Group in Switzerland earlier this month.

But it is a demonstration of what is wrong with Britain’s relationship with the European Union that avoiding having to pay for the bailout of another country requires such careful diplomacy.

Cameron needs to watch this crisis closely for a chance to change the terms of Britain’s membership for the better.

James Forsyth is political editor of The Spectator

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