That would be my idea of hell on earth.

@Peter. I’m really quite amazed that anyone could describe Iain Dale as “just a party hack”. he runs one of the most successful blogs in modern British politics and is probably on the national media as much as any other Tory. I’m not saying Dale would have been a better choice for the Tories than Stewart, merely that you have totally misunderstood the former.

Rory Stewart would have been quite a different proposition.

The two parliamentarians I know personally who are medics, Evan Harris and Brian Iddon, have contributed a great deal to medical and scientific debate. They tend to be more ‘liberal’ over the big questions like drug criminalisation etc, perhaps because their allegiance is to the scientific evidence rather than to pandering to a tabloid fears or a vocal minority. Obviously it depends whether the Tory whip will allow any new Tory doc. the freedom to express an opinion.

Aside from the economy, the big policy challenges facing new MPs are the environment and the NHS. So in general the more doctors the better, bring them on.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/5449286/a-parliament-of-doctors.thtml

Although I’m highly sympathetic to the Tories’ experiment in this area (and deeply frustrated by the old-fashioned, unimaginative, conservative approach of the LibDems), I think the basic problem is actually the (small) size of a Parliamentary constituency.

If you’re well embedded in a local community by – for example – being a church warden, a long-serving GP, a popular headmaster or whatever – you may well be able to prevail upon a personal contacts list of maybe 100 or 200
voters who are willing to turn up to a caucus and vote for you. That’s probably enough people to tip the balance.

In the USA, however, having a few dozen friends and allies willing to give your career a helpful push won’t be of much statistical help in trying to secure you the nomination to become the Democrat or Republican candidate for the US Senate in, say, Texas – as you might expect a million or so votes to be cast in total.

It stands to reason that larger, more populous caucuses are more likely to be won by candidates with star quality, because a parochial power base is less likely to have much sway. At a wild guess, I’d say that if the Tories had been looking for a candidate for Berkshire, rather than just Bracknell, then Dale would have comfortably defeated Dr Lee.

Unfortunately, your summation of the probable make-up of the next parliament is almost certainly going to be the case. I’ve met my local Tory PPC and she is an interesting character, yet none of the party literature we’ve been getting reflects any of this. It’s 100% centrally-crafted propaganda with the PPC’s personal pictures slotted in here and there.

It’s possible that she could plough her own furrow once elected, but highly unlikely for the very reasons you have highlighted … especially as she is a former researcher for a high-profile Tory. So probably just Tory voting fodder then.

This made me spill coffee all over my desk – but in a good way.

One thing, though, Mark, unrelated to the unarguable good sense of the line quoted above – do you think that the ‘open primary’ [i.e. caucus] selection method has much of an impact on the preferred candidate profile you describe? For instance, I can see why the sort of hardened party loyalist-activist whose social life hinges on leaflet delivery and survey cavassing would go for someone similarly inclined – but why would someone who isn’t even a party member care about this?

For me, the real surprise of Bracknell was the choice of a relatively ‘normal’ candidate over the two high-profile ones (Dale and Stewart) – this is what I’ve had expected if the local association had chosen the candidate, but not what I expected from an open primary.

Does anyone out there have a sense as to the proportion of party members / ‘outsiders’ voting in the meeting? What were the ‘negatives’ aimed at the candidates who didn’t win – e.g. were the high-profile candidates regarded as part-timers who might not show much commitment to the seat? In short I do wish someone who was there would write about this – less out of voyeuristic fascination (well, only a little) than because it might well say something about the selection process more generally.