Has Bracknell sent a message about local candidates in primaries?

The result has just been announced of the Conservative Bracknell open primary/caucus and the winner is Dr Phillip Lee. I want to extend my congratulations to Dr Lee for his victory in this hard fought contest.

The contest has been very closely tracked in the blogosphere not least because of the presence in the shortlist of the leading Conservative blogger Iain Dale who came third. My commiserations to him.

What I wanted to focus on in this post though is what message Bracknell may be trying to send to the Conservatives and politicians in general about these primaries and the candidates they were offered. I should state that despite being a constituent I was not at the meeting (I am abroad at the moment) so I do not know how each of the candidates performed. However I was concerned right from the outset that there were no local candidates on the shortlist.

My friend Darren did some interviews with some of the candidates on Bracknell Blog and from Phillip's interview, as well as other information I have seen it struck me that although he did not live in the constituency, he was the "most local" of the candidates having been a GP just 10 miles outside the seat boundary and actually having some on-call patients within the constituency. Given all of this, my hypothesis was that if the "localness" of a candidate was a crucial element in the minds of the voters then Phillip would win. That has now come to pass.

Of course I do not know if this was the crucial element in his election, there may well be other reasons. I would however be surprised if it was not at least a factor and given how close the contest seems to have been (it went to 5 rounds) it could easily have been what made the difference. So, perhaps there is a lesson here for all parties but especially the Conservatives who have been most keen on this form of caucus/primary type election.

I think it will be worth looking at how other contests of this nature go in the future to see if a pattern of local (or "more local") candidates being selected is borne out. If it is then it will be food for thought for the party bosses making the decisions about how to select candidates. After all, if it becomes increasingly difficult to parachute favoured candidates into safe seats in the future I suspect they will not like that. At all...


PS: I should just make clear my view that I think contests of this nature would be unnecessary if our electoral system was changed to Single Transferable Vote with multi-member constituencies. That would give the entire electorate the chance to rank multiple candidates from different parties as part of the election itself.