Is Kensington and Chelsea, that jewel in the crown of Conservative parliamentary seats, becoming the Bermuda Triangle of Tory politics? Thanks to the little-noticed workings of the Boundary Commission, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary, could soon find himself in a battle royal to remain in the Commons.
The local precedents are not good for Sir Malcolm. When Kensington was amalgamated with Chelsea in the run-up to the 1997 election, Dudley Fishburn stood down in favour of the Chelsea MP, Sir Nicholas Scott. The following year, Scott (by then suffering from the effects of Alzheimer’s) nearly crushed a child while parking his car and was then too drunk to attend his association’s party at party conference. He was promptly deselected. K&C thereupon picked Alan Clark, but he died of brain cancer within two and a half years. He was replaced by Michael Portillo, who retired from front-line politics after his failure to be elected Conservative leader in 2001. Sir Malcolm succeeded him in 2005, returning to the Commons eight years after losing in Edinburgh Pentlands.
Now K&C is to be broken up again. There will be a new Kensington division, stretching from the northerly tip of the Royal Borough — David Cameron’s home turf — down to the Fulham Road. Then there will be a new Chelsea and Fulham seat, crossing borough boundaries, which comprises those bits of Chelsea that are south of the Fulham Road (such as the Royal Hospital) with those solidly Tory parts of Fulham in the SW6 postcode.
Since more than 60 per cent of Sir Malcolm’s existing seat will be in the new Kensington division, the party’s model rules would theoretically allow him a ‘bye’ into the final round of any selection. The incumbent, though, is hedging his bets. If Rifkind went for the new Chelsea and Fulham nomination, he might also be entitled to a bye. But he would then be pitted against one of the party’s most dynamic campaigners, Greg Hands, MP for Hammersmith and Fulham, who recaptured the seat last year. Hands is the architect of the Tory revival in that key swing borough — which also resulted in the party recapturing the town hall earlier this month for the first time since 1968.
If Notting Hill is David Cameron’s residential home, then Hammersmith and Fulham surely qualifies as his spiritual home. It embodies the sort of modern grassroots conservatism that he wants the party to be all about. Rifkind and Hands have not yet spoken to one another about a potential carve-up of the spoils, but if they fight each other, the smart money is on Hands — the young blood versus the ageing gun-slinger on the verge of his seventh decade.
But neither is Sir Malcolm a shoo-in for the new Kensington. Why? The potential anti-Rifkind coalition is wide and disparate. The charge-sheet of his opponents includes allegations that he is not as assiduous a constituency MP as he might be, considering the proximity of the Commons; he did not attend ward AGMs in the run-up to the local elections as often as they think he ought; and he did not campaign enough.
Others grouse that Rifkind neither lives in the constituency in the week nor at weekends nor in recess, residing as he does in Westminster and Inveresk, East Lothian; that he concentrates too much on foreign affairs; that he focuses too much on extensive outside business interests such as his non-executive chairmanship of ArmorGroup International plc. Critics also cite the website monitoring MPs’ performance, TheyWorkForYou.com: Sir Malcolm has attended just 48 per cent of votes in the Commons, making him 602nd out of 646 MPs; he spoke in 18 debates in the last year, and thus was 413th.
Sir Malcolm responds to these charges with his trademark professionalism. He states that he attends those ward AGMs that he is invited to; that after returning from a week abroad which overlapped with the first week of the campaign, he was out several nights a week when the House was sitting and during the days when it was not; that he did mutual aid with Fulham; and that he was present at the count on the night of the local elections.
Rifkind further points out that many locals have second homes in the country; that his two predecessors did not live in K&C; that virtually all MPs specialise in particular areas, and foreign policy has been his major interest since his maiden speech in 1974; that his directorships only take up about 10 per cent of his time; that his voting record can be explained by his large number of constituency and outside speaking engagements; and that he comparatively rarely spoke because until December 2005 he was shadow work and pensions secretary. And his majority in 2005 went up markedly.
But the greatest sin in the Darwinian eyes of many Kensington and Chelsea Conservatives is that Rifkind is a loser. When he returned to the Commons last year, many expected that he would be a serious candidate for leader; had he won, all of these shortcomings, whether perceived or real, would have been forgiven.
Shortly before David Cameron became leader in December, Rifkind very politely wrote to him indicating that he would accept only the shadow foreign secretaryship. Cameron gave the post instead to William Hague. But some K&C members were unhappy that instead of serving the party from a front-bench position, Sir Malcolm coolly went off to do his own thing.
When the crunch comes, all eyes will be on the senior power-brokers in the association — and, above all, on the recently elected president of K&C, the Marquess of Salisbury. Salisbury has told colleagues privately that the old and the new associations need to think very carefully about what it is they want in an MP. He believes that they have not always done so in the distant past, plumping instead for glamour.
Salisbury has another much broader interest in the outcome. The forthcoming redistribution brigades the boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea together with Hammersmith and Fulham. This may also prefigure the brigading together of three associations in question — Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham — and the new Hammersmith. Hammersmith is a highly marginal seat, which on the basis of the local council results now has a notional Tory majority of just over 1,000. To maintain this momentum, they need to select a candidate as soon as possible. That logically means a swift selection for the other seats concerned, too.
Starting in his native Hertfordshire, Salisbury has been an important pioneer of a federative process whereby large, rich associations are brought together to provide full-time support for their weaker brethren in neighbouring marginals. The logic in this case is that instead of Tory campaigns in Kensington piling up huge majorities, the vast bulk of the collective effort would be redirected to Hammersmith. There would still be separate associations; but senior figures in the national party, taking a logical look at where resources are needed, suspect that the vast K&C headquarters at 1a Chelsea Manor Street and its agent should probably be moved to Hammersmith.
The fight for the nominations is thus about much more than just personalities: it is about what safe Conservative associations and their MPs are for. Are they centres of social life, with endless ward parties, working mostly for easy re-election victories within their own patch? Are they platforms for ‘big beasts’ to pronounce on the great issues of the day? Or should they, above all, be campaigning tools — to be deployed on a chessboard according to the wider interests of the party? The well-heeled (and not-so-well-heeled) Conservatives of west London will soon give their answer.