"...But some find it underwhelming"
Conservative Home: April 22nd 2025: PopCon's Head of Public Affairs, Sam Collins, reports on findings from recent PopCon survey
"Over the past six weeks Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and her senior team have been making the case... that they understand the need for major reform of the Conservative Party’s internal structures and processes. While admittedly not an issue likely to come up on the doorstep... it is a vital one.
For two decades or more Conservative Party members, especially on the right of the Party, have felt unappreciated (at best) by the professional party hierarchy.
Under William (now Lord) Hague the Party enacted a constitution that has resulted in, like the British state over the same period, gradually ever more power becoming centralised within CCHQ or outsourced to unaccountable ‘experts’...
...After 20 years of at best being considered nothing more than a campaigning resource, and at worst ‘swivel-eyed loons’, member morale is at an all-time low. The shell-shock of last year’s calamitous election result still hangs over many of our supporters, not to mention the feeling of painful loss from the defection of so many of our formerly most committed supporters to the Reform Party. If ever there was a situation where it was vital to prove to members that they are key and valued parts of our mission and organisation, now is that time...
Change... is vital if the Party is to rebuild as an effective – and election winning – force. It is clear, at least according to the most recent Popular Conservatism Opinion Panel survey, that if this is what the leadership is trying to achieve then it is not currently working...
An overwhelming majority of our opinion panel (made up of 571 current Conservative supporters...) agree that internal reform of the party should be a key priority for Kemi and her leadership team... assuming that Kemi, Julian Ellacott and Clare Hambro stand by the claim they made on this website recently that they understand how important it is for local members to get a proper say in candidate selections, they have the support of 91 per cent of the panel who agreed with the statement that “local associations should have the right to choose their candidate with minimum interference from CCHQ”...
...70 per cent (and 85 per cent if one excludes the ‘don’t knows’) of the panel backed roles such as the Chairman, Candidate Committee Chairman and Chairman of the Policy Forum being elected by members, rather than appointed...
...47 per cent of our panel believe that the internal reform of the party is going either quite or very poorly, while another 42 per cent don’t know. Only 1 per cent of our panel considered the internal reform to be going very well...
...The suspicion of the members could be seen first-hand on our PopConversation with Dominic Johnson, the Party Co-Chairman, summed up by one attendee as “smooth, emollient, vague”. Time and again questions on the democratisation of the Party were met with the response that focussed on the responsibilities of membership (such as the importance of recruiting new members or sharing social media posts from CCHQ) rather than how rights might be extended...
This is no way a complaint about Lord Johnson himself... the concern many viewers had was whether this view reflected the wider approach by the Badenoch leadership team: that reform was a matter of the leadership or professional party putting the ‘right’ people in place rather than truly devolving the power to make these decisions to members...
...internal party reform is key for party members – as our survey demonstrates. If the leadership want to rejuvenate membership and give our members the morale fillip we desperately need, they need to think bigger... We need root and branch reform."
You can read PopCon Press Release (with a link to tabulated results) HERE
You can watch PopCon's interview with Party Co-Chair, Lord Johnson, HERE