Veteran Tory Wants Conservative Leadership Contests To Be More "Transparent" To Stop "Fibbing And Skulduggery"
James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick are among those expected to run in the Conservative leadership contest (Alamy)
5 min read
Former Conservative MP John Penrose has called for MP voting rounds in Tory leadership contests to be made public to help the party stop choosing "problematic leaders".
This, he said, would make the Conservatives less likely of repeating the mistake of choosing a leader who will lead them to a “hurricane awful set of election results”.
As the Tories face their first period in opposition for more than 14 years, there is a debate within the party over which direction to go in in order to win again. The first question facing them is who will replace Rishi Sunak as leader, as he announced his intention to stand down following the party's historic defeat to Labour on 4 July.
It remains unclear when the contest will formally begin. Once it does, under current rules Conservative MPs will vote in a preliminary secret ballot, which takes place in rounds to whittle down the initial list of nominees. Once the list is narrowed to two candidates, the vote goes to the membership to then decide between the final two.
Penrose was the Conservative MP for Weston-super-Mare until the election, when he lost to Labour’s Daniel Aldridge by 4,409 votes. The former MP was also previously the United Kingdom Anti-Corruption Champion in the Home Office between 2017 and 2022.
He told PoliticsHome the MP ballot should be made open and transparent, rather than keeping who votes for who secret.
“The process has given us a couple of real problematic leaders over the course of the last couple of years,” he said.
“That's one of the key reasons why we just had this hurricane awful set of election results. It's really important to get the process absolutely chiselled and working the way it's supposed to.”
He argued that while most MPs know who most of their colleagues have voted for, the members and the public do not.
“I just think that's silly. It creates a sort of magic circle of people in the know and people who aren't in the know,” Penrose said.
“And for goodness sake, we're choosing either a leader of the opposition or a prime minister, in either case, a bit of transparency is hard to argue as a bad thing.”
Describing what he called “fibbing and skulduggery”, Penrose said that the secret ballot lended itself to MPs switching their votes in successive rounds, but not having to explain why they had done so.
“It's perfectly reasonable for them to explain to their local constituency associations and to the public and to members of the press, why they switch their votes from Candidate A to Candidate B?” he said.
“There are always rumours of offers of jobs being bandied around and personal preference and cronyism and all those things. If you have transparency, all those less admirable things would be exposed to public view, and would therefore, I hope, be a great deal less likely to happen.
“The job of Conservative MPs is very simple and very clear. It is to choose two people, both of whom are potentially prime minister material and capable. They've got to find two people who are both good enough, because that's the principle upon which they go forward to the membership.”
John Penrose resigned as United Kingdom Anti-Corruption Champion in 2022 and called for Boris Johnson to quit as prime minister over the Partygate scandal (Alamy)
He added that there were “always rumours” that MPs would move to get the final two to be between the candidate who is a long way in the lead and the weakest opponent to face them. But these rumours are by their very nature difficult to prove.
Penrose also said he believed TV hustings for the leadership contest would be damaging to the party’s image: “It creates blue on blue competitiveness, it fuels stories of party splits. Fundamentally, public blue on blue criticism of each other is never good.”
He suggested instead that the candidates should be subject to “long form forensic interviews” by journalists: “If any of them flounder or fold, then it's really important that we know that, and it's really important also for the members."
Conservative peer Lord Young wrote in The House magazine that the rules should be changed so only MPs choose the next leader, rather than members. Penrose disagreed, telling PoliticsHome that it was "vital" for members to be involved.
"If you try and take it away and make a party less democratic in the 21st century, it would look weird," he said.
"And it would also create a huge row internally within the party, which is the last thing we need – not just now, but really ever."
While Penrose would not back a particular potential candidate at this stage, he said that overall, the party needed a “process that creates consensus, rather than division”.
“The important thing from the Conservative Party's point of view is that we take a little bit of time in order to come back together again and to reunite and to reset and renew ourselves,” he said.
“Because until we do that, the rest of the country isn't going to be willing to listen to us, because we will still be the same old Conservative Party they just rejected. We’ve got to be an updated, renewed and reset party .”
Reflecting on his own defeat in Weston-super-mare, Penrose said that there was not much more that him and many other candidates could have done.
“We were all flat out,” he said.
“It [the result] was baked some time ago. It was baked when the Truss mini budget happened, and even though both Jeremy Hunt and Rishi were brilliant at stabilising things and getting the show back on the road… that wasn't the point.
"The point was that the problem had happened in the first place, and that was the moment when a lot of people made up their minds.”
And what next for Penrose? “I've only just caught up on sleep since last week… My immediate plans are I'm going to go fishing. When I come back from fishing, do feel free to ask me again, and I'll have a more long term answer than that.”
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