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| Gone-servative Party |
THE Tories are suffering a massive slump in Party membership, the News of the World can exclusively reveal.
Secret party documents show 40,000 supporters have left since David Cameron took over as leader three years ago.
And the slump has ACCELERATED over the past year with the constituencies of Shadow Cabinet members among the worst hit.
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has lost an incredible 240 members in the last three years. Osborne—rocked by the Yachtgate scandal over his alleged talks with a Russian billionaire about a possible party donation—lost 69 constituency members in the past year.
Also badly affected is Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague, whose constituency membership fell by 267 in just one year.
Overall, Tory Party membership has fallen from 290,000 to 250,000 in the three years since Cameron took over.
The ageing membership is dying off and the party is failing to attract youngsters.
Yet Labour has managed to stabilise its membership decline. When Tony Blair won the 1997 election the total number of members stood at 405,000.
In the decade after that victory, membership halved, returning to the level it was before Blair took over.
However, since Gordon Brown became PM last July the decline has halted and Labour has managed to entice 10,000 new members.
In contrast, a fifth of Conservative Associations across the country have lost one in five of their members. And half of them have seen their membership drop by ten per cent.
Constituency membership fell an average of 24 in 2006 and 93 in 2007. Each Shadow Cabinet member has lost an average of 81 members in the last year.
The figures also show 90 per cent of MPs’ membership has either fallen or stayed the same. Even Cameron has lost 19 members in his Witney constituency in Oxfordshire in the last year.
The fall in membership and the revenue it brings in, along with the credit crunch, means the Tories have been forced to take drastic steps to balance their books.
Last month ten per cent of Conservative Central Office staff were made redundant. Some 24 staff at the party’s Millbank headquarters lost their jobs.
A Conservative Party spokesman said of the losses: "Like many organisations in the current economic climate, we need to look very carefully at how we are using our resources and, unfortunately, there is a need to make budget cuts."
In a separate move the party also closed its Constituency Campaigning Services—based in Coleshill Manor in the West Midlands. It provided campaigning material and acted as a call centre for constituency parties.
Over 40 people there were made redundant. The membership decline could also prove devastating as the Tories are likely to be forced to spend the next 15 months campaigning before a 2010 General Election.
The most recent ICM polls show the Tories’ lead now stands at five points, down from 15 per cent less than a month ago. John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, Notts, said: "Cameron’s party is increasingly reliant on a falling and ageing membership which isn’t enthused and is unable to inspire friends to join."
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