Tory MP: "Our Ealing Southall campaign may have done lasting damage"

Mark Field, the Tory MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, has written a devastating critique of the way his party fought the Ealing Southall by-election. You can find it on the ConservativeHome website.

A few tasty morsels:

The centralised imposition of a Sikh candidate, who first became associated with the Party ten days before the by-election was called and whose most recent political activity had been attendance at a Labour Party fundraiser in mid-June, always had the makings of a fiasco. The way in the sensitivities [sic] of local Tory activists were bypassed amounted to contempt towards our supporters and the electorate at large.

This potential calamity was clearly spelt out by local folk as soon as the normal candidate selection process was discarded in favour of CCHQ adopting the photogenic son of a prominent local businessman with no previous links to the Party. Our consequent attempts to woo the Sikh vote in Southall by exploiting divisions which have wracked the local Sikh and Hindu communities for decades also struck many as blatant opportunism.

For sure the defection of five local Labour councillors, all Sikhs and whose ringleader was someone who only days before had failed to secure the Labour nomination for the by-election, made for good headlines at the start of the campaign. However, it became increasingly evident that the Conservatives had been manipulated by this dissident group, who were misleadingly presented to the public as having defected on ideological grounds.