Electing and Ejecting Party Leaders

Abstract

In 1998, the Conservative Party’s leader, William Hague, pushed through a package of reforms to his party’s organisation, of which the most eye-catching was a new system for selecting the party leader.¹ Since 1965, the Conservative leader had been elected by MPs alone, but the new system created a two-stage process by which MPs would choose two candidates to put to a postal ballot of individual party members. In doing so, the Tories became the last of the three main British parties to extend the franchise in leadership elections from MPs to members.² The Liberal Party had been the first in 1976, when it abandoned parliamentary ballots and moved to a complicated system of membership participation based on local ballots (see Chapter 5). A ‘pure’ system of one member-one vote (OMOV) was used by the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the Liberal Democrats, the successor party after the Liberals merged with the SDP in 1988. Labour also abandoned its exclusive use of parliamentary ballots, in 1981, when it adopted an electoral college that split votes between MPs, party activists and affiliated organisations such as trade unions. Initially, only activists who were members of their local general committees could vote, but the franchise was later extended to all party members in postal ballots. Votes in the affiliates section were also removed from union executives and conference delegates to individual union members (see Chapter 3). With the Conservatives’ adoption of their own form of OMOV in 1998, the extension of voting rights to members in the major British parties was complete. Like many changes to leadership-election rules, those in the Conservatives Party were implemented in opposition and followed a heavy election defeat.³ Labour had done the same in 1981 and again, to a lesser extent, in 1993.