William Hague warns changing Tory leadership vote rules to boost Boris Johnson could damage party
3 min read
William Hague has warned senior Conservatives against changing the rules on how a future Tory leader is elected amid fears it could damage the party in the long-run.
The former party chief said handing grassroots members a greater say on who leads could see the Tories “swamped” by entryist recruits, which he compared to Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader.
It comes after hard-line pro-Brexit campaign group Leave.EU urged its supporters to ‘flood’ the party to be “ready to elect a true Brexiteer” such as Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg.
“Such a change would be seen as helping ... Boris Johnson, who is currently thought to be more popular with the party members than with parliamentarians,” Mr Hague wrote in the Telegraph.
Currently only two MPs can go through to the final run-off of candidates for Tory leader – but members are calling on the ruling body to allow any MP with the support of 20 colleagues to go through.
The former frontbencher however said such a move would put too much power in the hands of Tory activists, who he says “are often the first to point out that they are not remotely representative of society at large or even of their voters”.
He added: “I am not arguing against boldness and radicalism, but against decisions easily swayed by the fashions of the moment, determined by unrepresentative minorities or unconnected from a much wider electorate.
“The worst of all arguments to change a system of such importance is to favour a particular candidate or outcome in the short term.
“For one thing, calculations of this kind are often wide of the mark or counter-productive, and most Conservative leadership battles have sprung a major surprise. But in any case, short-term needs make poor long-term rules.”
Mr Hague compared such an outcome to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015, which he said had left democracy “fundamentally weaker” given the lack of a “moderate” alternative to the current government.
“A small membership is then at risk at any time of being swamped by a sudden influx of new recruits – the very thing that happened in Labour in 2015,” he said.
“Having not thought to include the three-month membership requirement in their own new rules and having all candidates put to the whole party, Labour’s former leaders inadvertently produced the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, complete with extremism, anti-Semitism, divisiveness and the impossibility of removing him.
“The result of what might be thought of as a more perfect and open democracy in Labour is that British democracy as a whole is now fundamentally weaker, since there is currently no moderate, easily electable alternative to the government of the day.”
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