The Conservative revival: party membership

A shrunken and aged membership base weakens the party and has to be reversed as part of any recovery, but we have to set it in its proper context

A few weeks ago, I made a few initial observations about the Conservative Party’s general election defeat, the reasons behind it and some of the elements which would come into play in attempting to rebuild the party and begin the long journey back to electoral competitiveness and eventually government. I identified three broad prerequisites for a recovery: internal discipline and a sense of unity stemming from respect for and tolerance of each other; a positive and optimistic vision of the kind of country we want to create; and rigorously enforced standards of propriety and professionalism. And I made it clear that while these elements were only some of the basic building blocks, they were nonetheless imperative.

I have also outlined some of the qualities which I think a successful leader of the party in succession to Rishi Sunak will need to have. We now know the schedule and arrangements for the leadership election: nominations close at 2.30 pm today (Monday 29 July), and the declared candidates are James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick, Mel Stride, Dame Priti Patel and Kemi Badenoch. Suella Braverman has announced she will not seek the leadership. The result will be announced on Saturday 2 November. I have yet to decide, not that anyone is especially asking, whom I will support, but there are some candidates I regard as serious and plausible and some I think are clearly non-starters. But we have a long way to go.

When I wrote about the foundations of a Conservative revival, I noted that there would be no shortage of commentary on the future of the party, and that I would no doubt be contributing to it as generously as time and commissioning editors allow. There is a huge range of issues to be considered, from the most profound of philosophical precepts to the most quotidian and mechanical administrative questions, and it follows that you should expect some short, pithy pieces and some longer, more discursive essays. This one will err towards the former, and offers no great insights of originality but touches on a subject which has been mentioned by a lot of people and on which there are a few things I think are worth saying so that they are on the record.

The Conservative Party’s membership is small and old. Detailed figures are no longer made public, but we know that 141,725 people voted in 2022’s leadership contest, and that that represented a turnout of 82.2 per cent. This would mean that the party membership in September 2022 was 172,415, and it seems a fair assumption that it has decreased since then, through resignations, failures to renew and simple natural wastage. Let us suppose for a moment, then, that the current membership of the Conservative Party is something like 150,000.

That is a figure which should cause anxiety. At the end of March, the Labour Party announced that its membership was 366,604, and that reflected a fall of 23,000 which was ascribed to unhappiness over the party’s stance on the conflict in Gaza. It is entirely possible that victory at the general election will have attracted some new recruits and that the current membership is closer to 375,000 or 400,000. In any event we can safely assume it is comfortably double that of the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, say only that they have “more than 90,000” members, which again may have increased since their historic tally of MPs at the election. Perhaps it is now more or less 100,000. Reform UK, which has no real internal structures of bureaucracy and exists principally as a platform for its leader Nigel Farage, nonetheless claims a membership of 65,000.

Membership matters for many reasons, but a very important one is that a party’s grassroots are its lifeblood and the pool from which it draws candidates, officials and volunteers. Simon Cooke recently wrote in his Substack, The View from Cullingworth, about how the Conservative membership used to be not “a party of rallies or a cult of leadership” but “ordinary people across the country who organised themselves to get people they liked elected”. Similarly, Lord Goodman of Wycombe, former MP and long-time editor of ConservativeHome, argued in The Critic that the membership in decades gone by was “a formidable distribution mechanism for Conservative attitudes, arguments and, yes, ideas”. This is obviously and anecdotally true: speaking to Members of Parliament and unsuccessful candidates, a consistent story emerges of constituency parties the membership of which, by the time the general election was called in May and volunteers were sought for canvassing, was reluctant, disenchanted, physically infirm or, in some cases, deceased.

There is important context to remember here. Party political membership has declined across the board since the end of the Second World War, although the Conservatives have suffered more than any other party because they once achieved such strikingly large support. In 1946, the Conservative Party had 910,000 members, and this peaked at an extraordinary 2.8 million in 1953. It was still around a million by 1990 but had halved by 2000 and more than halved again by 2010 to stand at around 200,000. Its trend has been generally downwards to today’s low.

The picture for the Labour Party is more varied. In 1950 its membership stood at around a million, but for much of the next three decades the available figures are questionable because of the way in which constituency parties reported membership and assumptions that were made. By 1981, however, the figure was probably around 275,000 and remained around that level for a decade and more, until the election of Tony Blair as party leader in 1994 was accompanied by a concerted recruitment campaign which would see the total climb to 400,000 shortly before the 1997 general election. Thereafter it declined again until after the 2015 general election, when there was a surge in membership generally ascribed to the (eventually successful) candidacy for the party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. 422,664 people voted in that election, and when he was forced to submit himself to a challenge the following summer, membership swelled again to more than 600,000. However, that had fallen to 485,000 by August 2019, and by the end of 2021 it stood at 432,213. In July 2022 it stood at 415,000, and by 2023 had fallen again to 395,811. So, like the Conservatives, Labour has seen a long-term pattern of falling membership, though they currently stand at around twice the size of their main rivals.

One other factor affecting the Labour Party in particular is membership of affiliated trades unions and of the Co-operative Party, which has fielded joint candidates with Labour since 1927 (there are currently 43 Labour and Co-operative Members of Parliament, including three members of the cabinet, Lucy Powell, Jonathan Reynolds and Steve Reed). From the end of the Second World War until the early 1990s, these groups represented another five or six million members. There are now 11 trades unions affiliated to the Labour Party, with a combined membership of around 3.75 million, while the Co-operative Party’s membership in 2022 was 13,194.

The Liberal Party is estimated to have had 243,000 members in 1960, which declined slowly but steadily over the following decades. In 1983, the combined membership of the Liberals and their allies, the recently established Social Democratic Party, was about 145,000, and when the two parties merged to form the Liberal Democrats in 1988 they numbered 80,000 members. This climbed slightly to over 100,000 in the early 1990s but fell back to 70,000 a decade later. After the 2010 general election and the Liberal Democrats’ participation in the coalition government, the number fell sharply to 49,000 in 2011 and 44,000 in 2014. It rose sharply again to 107,000 by July 2019 before dropping to 73,544 by the end of 2021.

Setting aside the minutiae of each party, there is an obvious trend: joining a political party is simply much less common than it was 70 years ago. The Conservatives have plummeted from 2.8 million to perhaps 150,000, but Labour has shrunk from one million to maybe 375,00 and the Liberals/Liberal Democrats from 260,000 to perhaps 100,000. This does not mean that the Conservative Party should dismiss its shrunken membership as inevitable, but it is important to identify the right comparator: we should be measuring ourselves against our rivals, principally the Labour Party, rather than a past version of ourselves three or four generations ago.

While political parties and trades unions have general seen declining membership, there are still many membership organisations in the UK, and the estimated data for this year indicate that even the Labour Party only just scrapes into the top 20. The National Union of Students leads the pack with six million members, but the National Trust is not far behind on 5,588,000. Six of the top 20 are trades unions of one form or another, but the Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds has 1,140,000 members while the University of the Third Age has 388,000.

This points to two conclusions. The first is that the average Briton is still a “joiner”: using a maximal definition which includes schemes like supermarket loyalty cards, around 55 million of us, 80 per cent of the population, belong to some kind of membership organisation or association. But a corollary of that is that our identities, insofar as they are defined by such memberships, a complex and multifaceted. Using myself as an example, as well as a Conservative Party member, I am a former trades union member (the First Division Association), I belong to three clubs in central London, the Oxford Union Society, the London branch of my university alumni club, the Royal Society of Arts and the British Film Institute. These all perform different roles and have different weights in my life and sense of self but I doubt I am unusual in the number or diversity. I have friends who would add a church or religious group, charities, cultural, arts and heritage organisations and professional bodies. So the landscape into which a political party must fit is a complicated one.

The second conclusion is that, in the longer terms, that continued existence of a sense of “joinerism” indicates that the Conservative Party should not artificially limit its ambitions. While I think recreating the circumstances of the 1950s with a membership nearing three million is unlikely, a figure of half a million or perhaps more is not impossible. But that should be a project for the longer term. Over the course of this parliament we must be ambitious but focused and realistic, and regard the rebuilding of the party membership in relatively transactional terms. Voters will join naturally if we have a popular and articulate leader with policies which strike a chord with the electorate, but we also need members to volunteer, to work within the party organisation, to act as a pool of future candidates for elected office at all levels and simply to proselytise for the Conservative Party and Conservatism. It would be better, say, to aim for a membership of 250,000 and achieve it than try to reach 500,000 and fail.

Over the next 14 weeks of the leadership election, the candidates will no doubt talk a great deal about institutional reforms and the involvement of the membership in party democracy, governance and leadership. It will be fascinating to see what sorts of ideas are proposed, and whether they are well received. In particular there must be some discussion of the post of party chairman: there have been 15 incumbents, albeit some jointly, in the last 14 years, of whom few have been particularly successful or distinguished. I wrote about the role at the beginning of last year, after the enforced resignation of Nadhim Zahawi, and it is all too easy to look further back to outstanding figures like Lord Woolton, Lord Thorneycroft, Cecil Parkinson, Norman Tebbit and Chris Patten and wonder where things have gone wrong. I have no immediate conclusions but it must be part of the discussion as the year goes on.

A party dies without members, and it dies in a number of ways. If the Conservative Party does currently number something like 150,000 people, that has to be regarded as a low point and we cannot sink substantially further. Leadership candidates and others who want to influence the direction of the party will have views on how we can rebuild the grassroots and I am eager to hear as many as possible. As we do so, though, we must maintain a balance between ambition and realism. Our first task is to sustain the party’s existence and improve its operation. Once that is achieved, we can think more broadly about how we engage voters with the party and there may be innovative ways of transforming that process, but first things first. Stop the rot, analyse the problem, reverse the trend. Those are actions we cannot fail to take.