Huw Davies: Welsh Conservative insiders have connived to cut the membership out of candidate selection

Huw Davies is Deputy Chairman (Political) of the Monmouthshire Conservatives and blogs at The News at Huw.

A small internal debate regarding rules to readopt incumbent Senedd members has had a real impact on the current dire state of the Welsh Conservatives. What might seem a dry subject has been at the centre of the turmoil which has engulfed the Party since last year’s general election – turmoil which even triggered the toppling of Andrew RT Davies Senedd group leader.

Labour’s latest innovation in Cardiff Bay is that MSs will now be elected under proportional representation. The system had created new constituencies, abolishing the old system completely and increasing the number of MSs from 60 to 96.

It was a constitutional reform the Welsh Conservatives rightly opposed. But adapting to the new reality would – or at least, could and should – have provided us with an opportunity for renewal with fresh talent.

Unfortunately, the exact opposite has happened: with the new system used as cover, a major rule change has cut members out of the process and entrenched the power of incumbents and insiders.

Soon after last year’s general election, the Welsh Board was invited to assess the proposed rules for the selection of candidates for the Senedd. Only, according to sources who had attended the meeting, members of the Board were not allowed much time to consider the six-page document put to them.

In what was described to me as a “rushed stitch up”, the rules were given the nod with zero consultation with other parts of the voluntary party.

When they were circulated there was uproar – and rightly so. It was quickly apparent to myself and others that they had been designed to remove the overwhelming majority of members from the decision-making process.

Suddenly only a fraction, across the various federations and associations, could have a say in whether a Member of the Senedd (MS) could or could not have preferential access to the top of the electoral lists. This stacks the deck in favour of incumbents: the new system is easily manipulated in areas with small associations, especially so as Senedd staffers (who tend uniformly to favour their bosses keeping their seats) are amongst the privileged few allowed a say on readoption.

Not even the Welsh Party Chairman at the time could defend them on the record. Nor can the present one – because they are indefensible.

I chaired one of the recent meetings to “select” a sitting Senedd member, there were just twelve people in an almost 200-member federation in attendance (I am told at another such meeting, there were just five members). We were allowed only ten minutes to ask questions about why this person should keep their £70,000-a-year job.

It was in no way a suitable forum to scrutinise their work – but then it wasn’t meant to be.

The reason why these rules are so important and consequential is because they were a real opportunity to give the Welsh Conservatives a boost. New constituencies heralded new opportunities for open selections, so we could incentivise potential candidates and empower our members.

Instead, party insiders have put the Welsh Tories into reverse gear. In the last Senedd election, regional MSs – those elected on lists rather than via First-Past-The-Post constittuencies did not have incumbency rights at all. Several of the current crop owe their place in the Senedd to this.

Now they are trying to pull the ladder up behind them, and deprive Welsh members the chance of open selections. I have been informed by numerous sources that the group had lobbied for these new rules, and it isn’t obvious who else profits by them.

Following so swiftly from the ousting of RT Davies, after which the membership was likewise denied a vote on his successor, and it’s no surprise that more and more activists are starting to ask themselves why they bother. The rules have put off great individuals from standing, which has created an alleged shortage of candidates; many of these people have moved their sights to the local government elections in 2027, because they have seen their shot at the Senedd evaporate.

All this is compounded further by the shamelessness and duplicity of it. The Senedd group are very aware that the rules, by cutting out the vast majority of the membership, undermine their legitimacy.

One MS tweeted how delighted he was to be “selected” by using a photo not from the “selection” meeting, but from an association Christmas do – probably because it was another embarrassingly low-attendance incumbency meeting. In a blackly comic moment, this process also rubber-stamped the reselection of Russell George MS only days before he was charged by the Gambling Commission.

There were attempts to stop these rules from going ahead. Back last year, I backed a team in the recent Welsh Board elections who wanted to scrap the rules.

Unfortunately it wasn’t open to all members to have a vote. The Senedd group made it abundantly clear they did not want them to win, and Cardiff Bay insiders made strenuous efforts to ensure they did not – especially when one of the team worked for RT Davies. (It was this honourable attempt to empower our members that lead to several MSs wanting to bring him down.)

It cannot be stressed enough how critical the composition of these rules are to the current state, and the future, of the Welsh Conservatives.

We have low morale, collapsing local operations, defections, and a falling membership. Yet instead of trying to revitalise the organisation, our elected politicians are exploiting these conditions to shore up their own comfy positions in Cardiff Bay, where PR means that barring a complete collapse there will usually be a safe Tory berth or two at the top of the lists. The sad thing is, they thought no one would notice.

These rules serve nobody except a small clutch of devocrats petrified of an increasingly devosceptic membership, and are only accelerating the decay of the Welsh Conservatives just as Reform UK threatens to overturn the traditional Welsh political map and create a real challenger on the right. They need to be scrapped, and scrapped now.