MINORITIES ARE, on the whole, treated with more respect than they used to be. There is, however, one minority that can still be insulted with impunity and treated with a contempt that would be intolerable elsewhere.

I’m talking about the membership of the Conservative Party — a band dismissed even by those whom they work to put in power. And it is time that their plight was recognised and their rights articulated.

The “reforms” proposed by Michael Howard and amended at the behest of Tory MPs have been rightly ridiculed as an organisational shambles. There has been less protest at the fact that they are an outrage as a matter of principle.

The reforms involve the wresting of power and the withdrawal of a franchise from party members without the courtesy even of first asking them. Control over the party leadership would be restored to a Westminster club subject only to a process of “consultation” of which North Korea would be proud.

The Howard package is suspect in timing, perverse in its direction and ironic in content. It should not be adopted.

The timing of these changes reeks of intrigue. It is a bizarre world in which a party leader not only plans his own funeral but seeks to micromanage the coronation of his successor. It is clear that Mr Howard wants to manipulate events to frustrate David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, and advance one of his own protégés. This is the equivalent of the Labour Party, fearing defeat in 2009 and 2010, introducing proportional representation to maintain itself in office.

Mr Davis may have his faults (who does not?) but he should not be the victim of de facto vote-rigging. He should certainly not be blocked by a leader who is behaving as if he had won 397 seats for his party last month not a number 200 fewer. During that election campaign Mr Howard made much of his support for “British values”. The principal one of these, in my view, is fair play. To play Robert Mugabe with a party rulebook is not, I suggest, what the British might deem cricket.

The direction of Howard’s blueprint is perverse if not downright reactionary. The current method for selecting a Conservative leader is not perfect and there may be a case for handing the mechanism back to Members of Parliament. But it should be acknowledged that the trend over the past 20 years, not merely in Britain but across the whole democratic world, is for the choice of party leaders to be extended to the many, not restricted to a monopoly of the few.

The American concept of primary elections has been widely exported and the Tories followed this pattern. Yet it is being seriously asserted, with no sense of the paradox involved, that the revival of the Conservative Party begins with the membership being stripped of any meaningful role in selecting the leadership. Some Tories have, in effect, formed Modernisers Against Democracy. The acronym for this informal, unofficial, organisation would be MAD.

And then there is the irony implied in the content of Howard’s blueprint. The argument being offered is that Conservative MPs have a unique knowledge of the strengths and weakness of the candidates and they alone can be trusted to reach a rounded decision about their respective merits.

Yet what has been the record of this panoply of gods in the past 15 years? They usurped Margaret Thatcher and ushered in 15 years of civil conflict. They embraced the feeble John Major in 1990 and then again in 1995 simply because he was not Michael Heseltine. They plumped for William Hague in 1997 because he was not Ken Clarke and declined to move against him two years later when it was already evident that he was a liability. In 2001 they provided party members with a shortlist of Mr Clarke and Iain Duncan Smith — a choice between the unacceptable and the unelectable. The notion that they have divine inspiration is risible.

It is, furthermore, all part of a broader fallacy. To listen to some Tory MPs one might believe that the party in Parliament consists of an enlightened band of shrewd moderates who are desperate to charge towards the political centre ground but, alas, are constrained by a fanatical cadre of racist, sexist, homophobic, probably mentally unbalanced pensioners in the constituencies who crave ideological purity above power. This is nonsense. Long experience of the company of Conservative MPs has taught me that a disturbingly high proportion are themselves a few votes short of a full ballot box. I refuse to accept that it can be statistically possible for the Conservative Party in the country to contain a higher percentage of headcases.

There was a far better way for the Tories to review their rules and find a leader. Mr Howard should have resigned with immediate effect and his replacement been elected according to the existing regulations. At the same time an internal referendum should have been held in which the membership considered whether future leaders should emerge in the same way, or if they wanted to return the process to the alleged “experts” in the parliamentary party. There is a reasonable chance that the majority would consider turning the clock back — but nobody should ever be denied their franchise without their personal approval.

It is time for a peasants’ revolt in the Conservative Party. If I were a typical member I would think that if I am good enough to donate money to it, good enough to raise funds from others for it, good enough to stuff envelopes, good enough to deliver leaflets and good enough to knock on doors, then I am good enough to be asked to decide whether I keep or lose my vote on the party leadership. And if Mr Howard were a good enough leader to admit that he has made an awful mistake, he would abandon a divisive and factional scheme and let those who ultimately are his party determine its fate.

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