Philip Cowley is Professor of Parliamentary Government at the University of Nottingham, and runs the website www.revolts.co.uk, which monitors backbench behaviour. This Platform piece is a version of a paper that he presented at The Centre for British Politics' recent conference on Cameron's Conservatives. It is the third of a number of papers we are publishing from the conference.
Should the Conservatives manage to win the next general election – or even if they become the largest single party in a hung parliament – then the most striking thing about the new parliamentary party in the Commons will be how different it will be. Even without any more retirements those that we already know about, there will be around 180 incumbent Conservative MPs fighting the next election. To reach the 260 MPs required for minority status as the largest party, the party therefore needs at least 80 brand new MPs. Under such circumstances, some 31% of the Parliamentary Party will be new. Achieve the bare minimum for a majority, and some 48% of the parliamentary party will be newly elected. Similarly, there will be relatively few MPs with experience of sitting on the governent benches. As the largest single party in a hung parliament, just 31% will have been MPs prior to 1997; achieve a bare majority and those with experience on the government benches would amount to just 25%.
These figures are all a) rough estimates, and b) minima. More retirements in the run-up to the election will diminish yet further the pool of experienced MPs from which the Conservatives can draw. And in the event of the Conservatives achieving more than the bare minimum required for an overall majority, then the percentage with experience will be smaller still. It is entirely plausible that a majority Conservative government will see over half its MPs freshly minted.
It’s already well known that many of these new MPs will be visibly different from the incumbents, with more women MPs and MPs from ethnic minorities. The majority of the parliamentary party, though, will remain white and male, and this will be especially true at the higher levels of the government. In one respect, however, the parliamentary party will remain very similar to previous groups of Conservative parliamentarians. For all the talk of trying to create a parliamentary party in the image of those represented, the absence of working class MPs on the Conservative side of the House will continue. In 2005, the Conservatives gained 25% of the DE vote and 33% of the C2 vote. Almost no efforts have been made to ensure that this segment of the population – and of the Conservatives’ own supporters – receives representation on the Conservative benches.
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