Theme: Parties & Elections | Content Type: Journal article

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Choosing the Conservative Leader: a View from History

Vernon Bogdanor

theresa maya on the paper

Thomas Charters

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The history of the choice of Conservative Party leaders shows a progression from choice by an elite via choice by MPs to choice by party members. Even so, the parliamentary party retains, by contrast with the Labour Party, a dominant role in choosing the leader. The criterion of who is best placed to unify the party remains of importance, but is supplemented by two other criteria: who is best placed to win the next general election and who is the more genuinely Conservative of the various candidates. The Liz Truss premiership of 2022, however, the year of three Prime Ministers, seemed to cast doubt on the efficacy of Conservative leadership election rules.

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Volume 96, Issue 3

Latest Journal

Volume 96, Issue 3

This issue features a collection titled 'The Intellectual and Political Legacy of David Marquand', who died in April 2024, edited by Colin Crouch, Ben Jackson and Peter Sloman. In this collection, authors including Jean Seaton, Will Hutton and Hilary Wainwright consider Marquand's legacy as a great progressive thinker, his biography of Ramsay MacDonald, Labour's first prime minister, and the role of socialism for Marquand. Other articles include a commentary by Deborah Mabbett titled 'Welfare reform by numbers'; Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams on 'The Vices of Values: Matthew Goodwin and the Politics of Motivation'; Helen McCarthy on 'Why the WASPI has no Sting: Gender, Generation and Pension Inequalities'; and Sam Taylor Hill, Tariq Modood and John Denham on 'Multicultural Nationalism: Saving the White Working Class from Blue Labour?' A selection of book reviews feature Edmund Fawcett's review of 'Nationalism: A World History' by Eric Storm and Samuel Cohn's review of 'Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions from the Black Death to Covid' by Sheilagh Ogilvie.

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