![]() Parties rely on volunteers to stuff envelopes and knock doors and do all the bread-and-butter parts of campaigning. Election expenses rules and available resources make this almost impossible. Donors’ demands could easily curtail a radical agenda, but they would be absolutely necessary for setting up a professional party.Įven if you get the cash, a successful party cannot be run on paid staff alone. It would be hard to stay focused on the issues a new party has identified if they are not the ones the money men and women get excited at. Some will want to control the minutiae, especially those attracted to a newly developing party. It is not simply bungs for positive policies, but they are likely to want to set the direction of travel. Many political donors view the money they give as transactional. Even if this happens, the party has to be wary – people who give you money tend to want something in return. A new party would have the challenge of either convincing a few people to give them vast amounts of cash, or a vast amount of people to chip in a little. The only party that doesn’t rely on the very wealthy for survival is Labour, which draws significant funds from the unions. The money would have to come from somewhere, most likely major donors. Even outside of an election you need to spend, to ensure you have the right staff and resources when peacetime ends – covering everything from policy research to electoral strategy.Ī new party cannot hope to function without this and would have to pay for it. Reviewing that table, you see a pretty neat correlation between expenditure and results. In the year containing the last general election, the major parties spent in excess of £50 million each. Whilst British politics is not as awash with cash as across the Atlantic, a serious challenge to an incumbent party takes serious funds. All of this would have to be replicated by a new political party, without the benefit of the existing Conservative brand and with an uncertain chance of success. It comes in money, in volunteers, in staff, and candidates. There is a floor to Conservative support, and it is a high one.īeneath that is the infrastructure which delivers electoral success. It is currently the governing party, a name everyone knows (whether they love it or hate it), and even in a disastrous election it would receive around one in three votes. However much it may be floundering now, it is arguably the most successful political party the world has seen, having won elections through every iteration of modern Britain. The Conservative party’s great strength lies in its incumbency. The question remains whether anyone has the guts, the resources, and the smarts to do it. If there is a time to take it behind the electoral barn and put it out of its misery, it is probably now. It sits lower than ever in the polls and will likely lose the next general election. The party has become listless, intellectually incoherent and beholden to a declining demographic of voters. It’s not surprising he thinks of wrecking it. He has no loyalty to the party, no sentimental or political attachment to it. When that relationship failed, so too did Cummings’s project. It was an insurgent project which relied on proximity to the Prime Minister and cultivating an air that the PM needed Cummings more than the other way around. Brexit was part, but not all of this, a necessary precondition to unleash the state in a new direction. His relationship with it was always a temporary alliance driven by his own views of what to deliver for the country. He has never professed to be one, nor seemingly been a member of the party at any point. ![]() It is a strong take, and perhaps unexpected from someone who was at the heart of a Conservative government just a few years ago.Ĭummings is not, of course, a Conservative. He sees no sense in reviving or reforming it, only blood-eagling it. ![]() He calls for it to be driven into the earth, the furrows planted with salt, and banished for eternity like some latter day Carthage. Dominic Cummings’s response to the plight of the Conservative party is typically bellicose.
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