Thursday, November 26, 2009

Sign Up Now for the Open Primary


The City’s Tories are choosing my successor using the ‘open primary’ route.

The party will publish a shortlist of candidates after nominations close on Monday 30th November. There will be a public meeting at the Guildhall on 12th December to decide who becomes Cambridge’s next Conservative candidate.

Naturally, as a former Cambridge deputy chairman and Parliamentary spokesman, I will be in a position to comment with some knowledge on the runners and riders for this race. Watch this space closer to the time...

Register here to attend. It will be fun!

For the official site, visit http://www.cambridgeconservatives.org.uk/.
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3 comments:

  1. Richard,

    Do you know what electoral system will be used for the open primary? Is it just first past the post?
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  2. Richard Normington is a good bloke (and his Mum is a lovely lady who was an excellent County Councillor) and I am sorry that he is giving up on Cambridge.

    The City Conservatives will now need to be very watchful, for I do know that Conservative Central Office can be insistent in its attempts to get the 'wrong' candidates parachuted in to winnable seats. And I also hear that the Cameron clique is very insistent - in the name of 'diversity' - to parachute in to such as Cambridge entirely unlocal and unsuitable people. The City people need to make their own choice of a local Conservative candidate, not another from the London 'A' list.

    A further thought: if Mr Cameron pursues this 'diversity' business to its ultimate degree, how long will it be before a local Conservative Association is told to 'select' a gypsy 'traveller'? That would go down like a lead balloon in Cambridgeshire, where the 'diverse' society includes quite a large number of 'travellers.'
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  3. I think it's a knockout... like the national leadership contest it's a series of voting rounds with candidates dropping out one-by-one until someone wins more than 50% (or if someone gets 50% of the vote on the first round, they win outright).

    Personally, I'd have first-past-the-post result.

    I am not convinced that the second or third preferences of people who voted for defeated candidates should get the same weight as the first vote. We have also seen in France how the system of voting by rounds, and the trickery about it, can end up with ghastly results. Le Pen VS Chirac anyone?
    ReplyDelete

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