SOMETIMES A LITTLE less democracy is in order. Ask Tony Blair. When he won the Labour leadership he ruthlessly seized control of its selection procedures and he’s never let go. Women-only shortlists, which literally changed the face of Labour in Parliament and thus around the country, were just a part of it.

Key allies were trained to win key seats and given access to the membership lists that would enable them to knock on the right doors and charm the right people; local organisers were squeezed, rules changed so that party HQ could impose a candidate if the existing MP stood down at the last minute. Without these machinations, a host of the most promising candidates and allies of the party leadership would have had a lot more trouble getting selected.

And David Cameron promised to fight as hard. He was prepared to consider anything short of all-women shortlists, he told a meeting of Conservative women during his selection campaign, to get more female MPs into Parliament. He has changed a lot: the new Conservative A-list of candidates approved by party headquarters fast-tracks female candidates, while the “one speech each” selection meeting has been replaced with a public interview, and the Q&A by party activists with an assessment by a panel of local people, not necessarily even Conservative members. The idea is to give women, with more rounded characters and better communication skills than men, a head start over the white middle-class male trained to make a good speech and tickle the fancies of Hyacinth Bucket.

But it hasn’t been enough. In an interview on Monday Mr Cameron suggested he was prepared to allow local associations to include their own favoured candidates on shortlists, as nearly half of them have been ignoring the A-list anyway. He has also had to prompt those who are on the A-list to apply for seats that might be highly marginal rather than safe; many are waiting for the “better” seats to come up. He has had to double the size of the A-list to 200 in order to accommodate people who “shouldn’t” have been left off it the first time. A strange idea, that, tackling your mistake by repeating it. And with a survey on the ConservativeHome.com website showing last week that it costs more than £40,000 for a Tory to get elected to Parliament, it isn’t surprising that the party is still failing to attract lower-paid or poorer people even to apply.

Isn’t it clear yet that the plan isn’t working? Candidates on the A-list complain that their inclusion on a favoured roll is a hindrance, not a help. Central Office doesn’t even have the power, unlike Labour leaders, to parachute the best candidates into safe seats. And all this as the contest to be Tory mayoral candidate for London has had to be postponed because the laissez-faire approach of waiting for people to come forward has brought too thin a collection of candidates.

Like I said: too much democracy.

Mr Cameron ought to recognise, as Labour once had to, that trying to persuade local parties to change has failed. Conservative associations, which guard their independence like two-year-olds a favourite toy, have clung doggedly and dementedly on to their right to select the local white middle-class male in the face of years of pleas from Tory leaders to sit up and listen.

The ability of a clutch of idiots, often frankly bigots, not representative even of the Conservative Party, let alone the country as a whole, to dictate the face of the national party, has become one of the Tories’ totemic characteristics, a rule considered so untouchable that no one would dare meddle with it. They once said that about Clause Four.

Mr Cameron should seize the power from the associations and set up a system to choose candidates centrally. By watering down his reform instead, by shying away from confrontation, he is making himself look weak. “I’m confident that all Conservative-held and marginal seats will want to select their candidate from our priority list,” he said when he announced the plan last December. “But I will take nothing for granted. And so the third step that I can announce today is that after three months of selections, there will be a further pause to allow us to carry out a full review of progress. In the unlikely event that further action is necessary, such action will be taken.”

Tomorrow it will be three months since the A-list membership was announced. There would be outrage in the shires if the leader took their powers. Some local parties would implode. Fine. These people, the activists who control the associations, do the party no favours.

They donate just £1 million of the between £12million and £20million running costs of the party. They put off any voter not one of theirs already, banging on about Europe and immigration on the doorsteps. Many of them still hanker after Margaret Thatcher. Yes, they pop leaflets through doors, but the real campaigning work is conducted these days through telephone banks in distant call centres.

If they have very limited positive effect, they have an immeasurable negative one, every time they knock on a door, appear on television or select another candidate just the same as the one before him and the one before him. They are dragging down efforts to redraft and rebalance the Conservative Party. If I were Tory leader I’d be rid of them like a shot.

But Mr Cameron has a problem (another problem): the Tory leader himself is failing to practise what he preaches. Four of his five closest advisers are Old Etonians. There is only one woman with significant influence in his wider kitchen cabinet: his deputy chief of staff, Kate Fall. The most senior positions in his shadow team are all taken by men, most of them privately educated. The party leader can hardly force the associations to be more inclusive when he has so comprehensively failed to be so himself.

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