All political parties attract practitioners of the dark arts like the disgraced Tory aide Mark Clarke, whose reckless and bullying style got so out of hand that the young activist Elliott Johnson said he was being forced into suicide by it. Mr Clarke has now been expelled from the party for life. But there are three respects in which the modern Conservative party is particularly vulnerable to the damage that a man like this has done.
First, the Tory party is an unusually hollowed-out party, compared with the mass party that it was a generation or two ago. Unlike Labour, the SNP and even the Liberal Democrats, moreover, the Tory party has not experienced a recent irruption of fresh membership. The chief-to-activist ratio is high. This hollowness means the Tories are less defended against an ambitious chancer. A man like Mr Clarke can thus go very far very fast – and can do disproportionate damage.
Second, the Tory party has always been a top-down party. There is no internal democracy and no affiliated organisations. As a consequence there are few internal checks and balances either. The leader controls the party organisation, appoints the party chair and sets the central office tone. Occasionally, there are tensions between the leader and central office, as there were under Iain Duncan Smith. But in general the party does what the leader says, not vice versa. Those whose face doesn’t fit, for whatever reason, have nowhere to turn to when they need.
And, finally, the Conservatives are in government, and may well remain there for a generation. Government means power. Power attracts the unscrupulous, the greedy and the zealous. It is a dog-eat-dog culture. Any young person wanting to make their way in politics, but without strong beliefs, will gravitate in only one direction these days.
As a result, there is something particularly 18th century about today’s Tory party. Money and personal connection are the oils that run the modern machine. The Clarke case has now cost the former chair Grant Shapps his ministerial job. But the unreliable Mr Shapps was not the only decision-maker at central office during the general election who mattered. Party co-chair Andrew Feldman called the shots with him. Lord Feldman, an old friend of David Cameron, signed off on Mr Clarke’s Road Trip project, around which most of the allegations cluster.
The Tory party is still playing catchup with its crisis. Officials initially asked the law firm Clifford Chance to audit an internal investigation. Then they asked the firm to supply an external review, with party officials remaining in charge. As the Conservative Home website correctly observed, this means the party was still marking its own homework. On Monday the whole probe was finally handed over to Clifford Chance, which has advised many Whitehall departments under this government, with the crossbench peer Lord Pannick QC as reviewer.
That was a radical change of approach. It was underlined by a potentially far-reaching separate decision to set up an independent review of the party’s own governance. Lord Feldman is not yet in the clear but if the outcome is to create an internal ombudsman, to whom party members and workers can turn with complaints against officials and representatives, and whose reports could be published, then some good may finally have emerged from a miserable party management failure and an avoidable personal tragedy.
