Will the last person to leave the Tory party please turn out the lights? After an exodus of Conservative MPs from their jobs before the election (75 of them decided to quit rather than contest) we found out at today’s leadership announcement, courtesy of Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 Committee, that members have bolted from the party too.
The Tories don’t like to release their official membership numbers, but Blackman, just before announcing the results, said that the ‘total number of eligible electors’ (really meaning members) was 131,680. Now, if Mr Steerpike’s memory serves him correctly, in the 2022 run-off between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, there were allegedly 172,437 ‘eligible electors’. By my back-of-the-envelope mathematics, it means the party has lost over 40,000 regular members in just two years. At this rate, the party’s membership is dwindling faster than Keir Starmer’s approval rating…
The fall in membership doesn’t just mean a reduced electorate, of course –the Tory party coffers suffer too. Let’s go back to 2022 again... The party having 172,000 members a couple years ago might sound pretty good given the latest figure, but members had actually fallen from a ten-year high of 200,000 in 2021. To make up for the lost cash (it had already been a bad year for donations) the party increased the annual cost of membership from £25 to £39. Might the fees be hiked once more?
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