It has always been a mystery – even to those of us who have spent more than a decade trundling along toThe Tories went through a phase of having shops in their conference hall which sold clothing and upmarket jams.
Not only do members get a chance to be charmed and surprised, they are also being enlisted in the sort of fake popularity contest that you’d expect in secondary school, not a party recently in government. Leadership campaigns are working out how to get the biggest queues to fringe events so that their candidate appears so popular with members that MPs feel bound to vote them through to the final round.
The strange thing about an election is that it is the point at which a party has had the greatest amount of verbal feedback from voters, but its activists tend to come back from the doorstep having heard something completely different to the complaints voters were trying to make.Just look at the conclusions Labour members reached from the 2010, 2015 and 2017 results, and who they chose as their leaders as a result.