Back in September 2024, with the Conservatives still smarting from their heaviest ever election defeat, former cabinet minister Grant Shapps formed Conservatives Together, “a new organisation created to support Conservative MPs, prospective parliamentary candidates, and activists”.
Formed with Tory peer Ross Kempsell, publisher of the Guido Fawkes website, Conservatives Together aims to “to support the next generation of Conservative candidates”, although it was pointed out that many of the next generation it was keen to support was also the last generation, composed largely of those kicked out in 2024 – including one Grant Shapps, who somehow conspired to lose what should have been the safe seat of Welwyn Hatfield to Labour.
Many in the Tories suspected the operation’s main aim was to keep Shapps, the spreadsheet-wielding plotter, at the heart of the party, keeping him prominently involved and positioning himself at the centre of candidate selection research and training. If so, it hasn’t worked.
The short-lived former home secretary has just been blocked from standing for selection as a Conservative parliamentary candidate for a second time by Kemi Badenoch, who wants “people to know that this is a new Conservative Party”.
She told a news conference on Thursday: “It is not going to be making the mistakes of the past. We lost 250 MPs at the last election.
“We are changing policies, we are changing people, we are changing process. What I have said is we want people who are going to meet the standards which we are setting. Who are going to abide by the policies I have put red lines on. There could be all sorts of reasons for any individual to be allowed or not allowed on the list.”
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Badenoch has said that all future Tory candidates must agree to abandoning net zero carbon policies and to withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights – positions Shapps has disagreed with in the past, but is thought to be willing to accept along with the slaughter of the first-born if it meant getting back into Parliament.
It is also unlikely Badenoch is saving Shapps for a peerage, given she named three new members of the House of Lords earlier this month and once again overlooked the man routinely described during the last Conservative government as its “best communicator” and “minister for the Today programme”.
A ‘source’ told BBC News of Shapps’s latest snub: “It reflects badly on Kemi’s temperament. North Korean purges don’t work in British politics.” It is not known who this source might be – Michael Green, Corinne Stockheath or Sebastian Fox perhaps, all pseudonyms or aliases employed by Shapps during his self-help and marketing careers?
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