THE PERILS OF SUPERFLUITY:

Tory party faces meltdown as its grassroots troops desert or die (Andrew Pierce, 12/05/05, Times of London)

THE new Tory leader will tomorrow inherit a Conservative Party organisation that is in danger of collapsing in large swathes of the country, with many constituency associations verging on the brink of extinction.

The new leader, expected to be David Cameron, will head a party where almost half of the 450 active associations have fewer than 100 members and 170 have income that has slumped below £1,000-a-year, according to an internal report commissioned by Francis Maude, the party chairman. The situation is so dire that the party leadership has put 200 associations on an “at risk” list. [...]

The report, A 21st Century Party, ordered by the Conservative Party high command, is a devastating indictment of the state of the party. As recently as the 1960s it was one of the biggest mass political movements in the world, with three million members.

Today the figure is closer to 280,000, with the majority of members in receipt of their old age pensions.

Having surrendered Thatcherism to Tony Blair, what was the point of a Tory Party the past ten years?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 5, 2005 9:14 AM