A FEW WEEKS ago I took up blogging. A bit late in life, one might think, except that the web itself arrived rather late in my life. I have started just in time. Bloggers, with their independent contributions, hit American politics in the 2004 presidential election. Now, for the first time, a big political story in Britain has been created on the web rather than in the press.

This important story is the Conservative Party’s priority candidates list, and the party’s refusal, so far, to publish it. I was interested in this already, because a son and a daughter of ours had both applied to get on to the A-list, which allows one’s name to go forward for winnable seats. Neither got on to the list — too Eurosceptic, I think, or perhaps just too Conservative.

I was puzzled that the Conservative Party ever thought of keeping the list secret. In all its propaganda, it claims to be committed to open politics; as a journalist, I naturally support openness. The priority-list system had created a small, privileged group of candidates, based on quotas for gender and race. Obviously their names should be public knowledge.

The bloggers’ website, Conservative Home (conservativehome.blogs.com), decided to break this censorship. Its readers were invited to send in the names of people who had made the A-list. Their names have come in one by one. By yesterday afternoon 66 out of more than 100 had been identified. We still do not know all the names, but we now know enough to form a preliminary view of the list. The web has once again triumphed over official secrecy, as might have been expected.

I originally thought the secrecy was simply the usual reluctance of a bureaucracy to tell more than it has to. Those who don’t know what is happening cannot effectively object. At the weekend I telephoned Francis Maude, the rather divisive chairman of the Conservative Party. He took the line that it would be “invidious” to publish the A-list because it would then be known who was not on it. He did not seek to maintain that the non-publication was consistent with open politics. We went on to discuss the question of merit; is a Conservative candidature a career open to the talents? He freely conceded that the new centralised quota system was less meritocratic than the old constituency system, though he regarded that as imperfect.

Not open; not meritocratic. I observed, rather tartly, that his replies did not mitigate my criticisms. Francis Maude was concerned to distance himself and his leader from the actual process of selection. He told me that David Cameron and himself had seen the list only on some date after it was drawn up by a panel with James Arbuthnot in the chair. Mr Arbuthnot was Opposition Chief Whip in William Hague’s period.

I spent Saturday evening studying the list on Conservative Home. Only a third of the candidates promoted to the priority list had fought a constituency in 2005. That is not an absolute test, but it can provide useful information. The essential quality in every candidate, at every level, is the capacity for hard work. With those who fought seats at recent elections, it can be established whether they are professionally competent and whether they are able and willing to give their time.

The worst candidates on the priority list are those who are known, if not to the Conservative Office, to be thoroughly lazy. The minor celebrities who have had no previous exposure to political work are unlikely to spend the next three years fighting marginal seats as they have to be fought.

In choosing 100 priority candidates, the party is disappointing at least 400 experienced candidates who have fought council or parliamentary seats. The 400 rather than the A-list are the party’s core of workers. If you want him to go on working, you must give the dog at least the distant prospect of a bone.

The regional distribution of the list may seem better when the complete priority list is published. At present London has about 40 per cent, while Wales only has one candidate. Wales always gets forgotten. There are large areas of England that are seriously under-represented. The West Country leaps straight from Hampshire to Cornwall with little or nothing in between.

The Liberal Democrats have shown that local candidates win seats. The Conservative list is more striking for metropolitan mini-celebrities than for strong local candidates. There are hardly any priority candidates with strong rural connections; I counted one farmer; for that matter, there were only four or five practical business people.

Such an analysis is not encouraging. However, one should take a broader view. The main point of the priority list was to get more first-class women into Parliament. Among the 61 candidates who have been identified there are, indeed, more than 30 women.

The great majority of them are little known. There was a hope that head-hunters would find a significant number of outstanding women, new to politics, who would help to make the Conservatives an attractive party. Unfortunately, that has not happened.

There are very few widely recognised women on the list. I found a couple who should not have been on the list at all, but only a couple. On the other hand, I only spotted one outstanding woman whose political experience and fresh personality would make her ideal for almost any seat. That is Angie Bray. If the trawl had picked up a few more Angie Brays one might feel it had been justified. Mr Cameron has invested much political capital in this list. He will persist because he sees it as an issue of power. But the list has to win the trust of the constituencies; for that it is too metropolitan, too narrow, too wet and too dim. No serious person accepts that constituencies should have weak candidates, women or men imposed on them.

Francis Maude’s grand strategy is beginning to look like a failure.

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