The UK Election: 2. How Are Candidates Selected?

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Suffs!

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Hello and welcome to Understand the UK Election, your essential guide to the general election.

I'm Adam Fleming.

My day job is presenting Newscast, which is the BBC's daily news podcast, but I've been covering elections ever since 2005, meaning this is my sixth general election as a professional journalist.

In today's episode, we're going to look at how the parties actually select their candidates who then come and knock on your door asking for your vote.

I have interviewed hundreds of political candidates all over the country and I can tell you there's a real spectrum from some where you think, wow, this person could be a prime minister one day, to, wow, is it wise that this person is even doing this interview with me?

So I've spoken to a lot of people who have then come and knocked on your door.

I'm going to be helped by the legendary political journalist, Michael Crick, who's here.

Hi, Michael.

Hello.

I have watched you pretty much on every channel, I think, through my life.

That's nice to know.

But now one of your channels is on social media where your handle is at tomorrow's MPs.

That's right.

Shedding light on Britain's hidden elections.

Exactly.

Why that?

Well, I've been interested in candidate selections.

for decades.

In my very early life, I had political ambitions.

And it's the crucial moment, the selection for a winnable seat.

That turns the budding politician, the amateur, into the professional.

The candidate processes are the equivalent of the primary elections in America.

Because the Americans don't just have primary elections to choose their presidential candidates, it goes all the way down.

So you have primary elections to choose the Senate and House candidates, primary elections for the assemblies in each individual state.

And that's a very public process and a very expensive process for the people involved.

Whereas here, that's all hidden.

And a lot of aspects of it still are hidden.

And the whole process involves so much chicanery, fixing, you know, buttering up the right people, a lot of fixes.

I regard it as my job to find out a little bit more about that and who the people are.

So, I mean, there's loads to dive into and loads to kind of tease out from there.

But I suppose maybe the big thing we should start off by saying is that each party has slightly different ways of doing it.

But what's kind of like the typical journey for someone becoming a candidate?

Well, in the Conservative case and the Liber Dem case, you've got to get on the candidates list.

You've got to be approved from on high.

And you've got to go and have weekends where you go before an assessment board and they interview you and they put you in various situations.

And, you you know you have to do a mock interview with the press and and all of that kind of thing and as a contender a would-be candidate you actually have to pay quite a lot of money to go through this process whereas in the labor case you just apply any member of the labor party could apply to be a candidate and then they're vetted and that is a process that is not always very efficient both parties then go through a process of a long list and then a short list which really involve consultation between the national party and the local party.

In the Conservative case, it's all decided at an old-fashioned selection meeting.

The members are invited, they turn up, often quite small numbers in this selection round, just a few dozen people, or even 10 or 12 in some of the unwinnable seats.

And they then listen to the candidates and ask them questions and make their minds up and vote on them on the night.

So there is an element of drama there in the Conservative case, whereas in the Labour case, they too have a selection meeting or they call it a a hustings meeting.

But Labour allow postal voting and in many cases, online voting beforehand.

And so often the results decided before the actual selection meeting.

You know, up until about 20 years ago, it was quite common for a candidate to try one place and then another and then another, and you'd go around the country.

And with the Conservatives, you often found the same people turning up for the selections.

You know, about 25 years ago, it'd be Theresa May, George Osborne, David Cameron, Damian Greene, all turning up with the same selection.

And then one of them would get chosen and then the caravan, as it were, the circus, would move on.

Now there's a lot less of that because the power of being local is so much greater these days.

Local activists, reflecting the views of local voters, it must be said, are really very keen on having a local candidate.

So that rather reduces the choice.

If you're a would-be MP, how many places can one individual claim, you know reasonably to be local maybe where you work and live now and maybe where you were born which is why you get so many former councillors or current councillors exactly I mean about two-thirds of them are either former councillors or current councillors and of course that makes it very difficult if you you know I mean in fact I said this to Kier Starmer once I said you know it's a good thing you now live in London because if you were stuck in East Surrey where he was brought up he would never have become a Labour MP because Labour's never going to get elected in East Surrey and the same is true if you're a Conservative brought up in the valleys of South Wales.

You've got to remember, we're not just electing 651 MPs here.

We are electing the pool of people from whom the next government will be chosen.

Nearly all ministers are in the House of Commons, and we need people of high caliber, people with big picture minds, people who are, you know, capable of negotiating international summits and who understand the economy and understand defence and understand those big issues.

So with all that in mind, does that mean the old kind of axiom of, oh, if you're a budding politician, you have to go and lose in a few no-hope contests before you then get a seat that you've got a better chance in?

That's going away.

I think that probably is reducing slightly.

Because that's what Blair and Cameron did, isn't it?

Like

they had to lose a few times.

Well, Blair stood in the Beaconsfield by-election after the Falklands War famously in 82.

Well, this is going to go down in history, isn't it?

There's the Falklands by-election.

And then he got chosen for Sedgefield the following year.

And I think he was the last seat for Labour, and a safe one at that, to be chosen as a Labour candidate.

You know, rock-solid Labour majority was Sedgefield then.

It's now Conservative, actually, part of the Red Wall.

And Cameron stood in Stafford, I think, in 1997.

Not a good year for the Conservatives.

Peter, one of the interesting things about this election is whether this is an anti-Tory vote and using their vote effectively to do that.

Has that been happening on a big scale?

Oh, never in a British general election have we seen tactical voting on this scale, and the results have been quite spectacular.

So, mostly in the old days, people did stand somewhere else first.

And in some cases, it takes almost decades.

I mean, Michael Howard took 17 years between being a candidate for Liverpool Edge Hill, which he didn't win, and being a candidate for Folkestone.

And Betty Bootheroy took about the same length.

She tried all sorts of places and then eventually got elected for West Brom.

That is slightly less now, but you still do get people who've stood three or four times sometimes, and that way they're, you know, they're earning their reputation, they're earning the skills of campaigning.

And one of the things that local parties are a lot keener to hear from candidates about is how would you campaign in this seat?

What issues would you pursue?

It has to be said, a lot of the process isn't really that political.

For a while, when David Cameron was leader, the Conservatives had these things called open primaries.

And there was one in Battersea, where I live.

And it was surprising how little politics there was to it and how similar all the answers were.

You know, everybody being safe.

You had to listen really carefully.

Yes.

Which I suppose, as a news political journalist, I was used to to discern what differences there were between the candidates.

And it's interesting, just talking about the chicanery, as you put it, that was on behind the scenes.

I was reading that biography of Keir Starmer by Tom Baldwin, the former Times journalist and former Labour spin doctor.

It's a very sympathetic biography, but they talk about the fact that Ed Miliband, who is Labour leader at the time, had to delay the selection in Starmer's constituency so that Keir Starmer could have been a member of the Labour Party for long enough to be considered as a candidate for selection because he'd had to resign his Labour Party membership when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.

Margaret Thatcher, this is in Charles Moore's biography, so it must be true.

When she went for Finchley in 1958, the year before she was elected, she actually lost the selection meeting by, I think, a couple of votes from my memory.

But the chairman of the Finchley Association was so taken by Margaret Thatcher.

And so he switched a couple of votes the other way and announced that she'd won.

And Margaret Thatcher got into parliament on a fiddle that was not known about for decades.

And I should say, we've mentioned a few constituencies and people.

And if you want to see a full list of candidates for any constituency in the UK, that is available now on the BBC News website.

Just to check a few bits of terminology that floated around over the last few years, what's the chicken run?

The chicken run really is when an MP decides that they're going to lose their current seat, or their current seat has been squeezed out by the boundary changes, and all the constituencies change what area they cover, and some seats disappear altogether.

And so they've got to go and find a new seat.

And this is treated rather disparaging by a lot of people, but it doesn't happen as much as it used to happen.

It's regarded as bad form, really, to give up a seat that you look like losing and to look for a better one.

And not to be confused with the rubber chicken circuit, which is where big-name politicians go and schmooze local party associations to come.

Well, they're when they go and address local association dinners, and invariably, so they say, they get served chicken that tastes like rubber.

The other bit of jargon that was very big in the last few years with Labour under Jeremy Jeremy Corbyn was mandatory reselection.

Explain why those two words kept on cropping up in that period and why it was so important.

Well, the whole idea of mandatory reselection has been around in the Labour Party really since the the 70s and was promoted in those days by Tony Benn and Chris Mullin, Tony Benn being an MP, Chris Mullin who later became an MP, having written a pamphlet about how to go about it.

And the idea was that before every election there should be a process whereby the party formally reselects the candidate and maybe invites other people to apply as well.

This is an argument that's gone back and forth within the Labour Party.

Another bit of jargon we heard a lot during the Cameron years, the A-list.

What was the A-list?

Well, in the Cameron years, the Conservatives decided they were going to improve the caliber of their MPs and they were going to draw up this A-list and recruit the best and the brightest that they could find, not just from existing Conservatives, but go out and invite people who weren't necessarily party members to put their names forward and to join the A-list.

We will change the way we look.

Nine out of ten Conservative MPs, like me, are white men.

We need to change the scandalous under-representation of women in the Conservative Party, and we'll do that.

And the A-list would be given priority and would be given an extra help in getting seats but this caused a huge amount of resentment amongst the the party grassroots and it doesn't exist anymore how do you think history will judge all women shortlists in the labour party pros and cons well they've worked i mean in 2019 a majority of Labour MPs were women just about 50, 51, 52% of the Labour MPs elected.

And indeed, because of that, Labour have had to abandon the policy of some seats.

I should explain what all women's shortlists are, really.

Basically, the Labour Party decided that certain constituencies, the only people who could apply were women.

So men weren't allowed to apply in those seats.

So there would be a shortlist drawn up that was all women.

And that led to the 2019 election, where a majority of the parliamentary Labour Party were women.

Also, just finally, this election, irrespective of the outcome, is going to be one of those watershed moments where just loads of people people have left and loads of new people are coming in.

Yeah, I mean, it could be as many as half.

I mean, if Labour were to get a huge majority, you could see more than half.

I mean, we know that it's well over 100 MPs are retiring.

Well, if you get another 200 who lose their seats, and that could happen, then you could see the biggest change in the House of Commons since 1945.

Michael, thank you very much.

Thank you.

And that's all for this episode of Understand the UK UK election.

On the next one, we're going to be talking about party manifestos, those lists of promises and pledges.

And we'll be asking how important they are to the parties and, more importantly, to the voters.

And you can find more of our episodes on BBC Sounds.

Just search for Understand the UK election.

And if you would like to keep up to date with the day-to-day, blow-by-blow events in the campaign, you can listen to my other podcast, Newscast.

See you again soon.

Bye.

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Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be home.

Winner, best score.

We the man to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.