The open primary system has been adapted by the Tories from America, where it is used at all levels, from state legislatures to the presidency itself. In the Tory version, anyone can put themselves forward for nomination, provided that they are a Conservative party member. A team of headhunters is set to encourage suitable people who might never have considered running for office to put their names forward. A selection panel will whittle them down and from this will emerge a shortlist of six or so names, by the end of September of this year.
Now for the interesting bit. In October and November the candidates will be in a straight run-off against each other for the nomination, and every Londoner, not merely Conservative party members, will be able to vote for them. It will be Pop Idol politics, as all try to show that they have that elusive va-va-voom needed to set the capital’s heartbeat racing.
Is there a serious point here, or is this just a PR stunt? Of course, it has given the Tories a head start in publicity, which they badly need to counter the in-built advantages enjoyed by Ken Livingstone as the current mayor. But it’s also worth noting the subtle logic of the open primary system. Because anyone can vote, it automatically favours the candidate with the widest appeal to the London electorate as a whole.
And because it gives two months’ airtime to all six candidates, it would generate a stable of good candidates, all of whom have been blooded for high office. With luck, what will emerge is an invigorated official opposition 18 months before the election. No more free ride, Mr Livingstone.
Best of all, an open primary promises to reach out to new and untapped voters in London, and to start to re-engage them not merely with the Tories, but with politics itself. Let’s not forget that the 2005 general election saw little improvement in voter disenchantment: turnout was only just above the 2001 low-water mark of 59%. Of course there are risks in the primary process: an organised campaign by Labour or the Lib Dems may distort the result, or the public may switch off. But these risks are worth the candle.
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And there is a deeper reason why this experiment is so worthwhile. By generating much wider argument and debate, it makes it far more likely that a winning candidate will emerge.
There is now a huge literature on the theory of “wise crowds”: the phenomenon whereby diverse groups make better judgments than experts. To be “wise”, a group must satisfy four conditions: its members must be diverse, independent (each person exercising his or her own view), and decentralised (so people can specialise and draw on specific or local knowledge). Finally, there must be some means, such as an election or a market, by which to gather their private judgments or choices together into a collective decision.
When these conditions are met, the results can be astounding. Compared to experts, crowds are generally better at estimating things (such as the weight of a rendered and dressed ox, in a 1906 experiment of Francis Galton); quicker at accurately assessing outcomes (such as the reason why the Challenger space shuttle blew up); better at estimating the outcomes of sporting events; and better at picking stocks and shares. And specifically, it turns out that groups consisting just of experts are regularly less good than groups that also include non-experts under testable laboratory conditions.
The Conservatives’ open primary does not meet these conditions fully: there will probably still be more Conservative voters than in the electorate as a whole. But these voters will be vastly more diverse, independent-minded and decentralised than in a normal, closed selection process, so there is reason to think their choice will be a wise one.
In this, as in the A-list, there is an underlying logic about the Conservatives’ present emphasis on diversity, which many media pundits and party members have not so far detected. As I show in a new book, the Conservatives are reaching for what is in effect a new conception of society: a “connected society”.
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The idea of a “connected society” has its intellectual roots in a tradition that goes back to the 18th century. In such a society, what matters is not the relation between the state and the individual, but rather the links between people themselves, and the institutions which give their lives purpose and meaning.
It is no accident that the idea of a connected society emphasises precisely the things that make crowds wise. Its whole focus is on promoting diversity and independent-mindedness, and much of the point of its insistence on markets and conversation is to enable these important aggregators of human opinion to function effectively.
The present one-size-fits-all statism of Gordon Brown, by contrast, in which ever-increasing amounts of money are poured into public services of diminishing effectiveness, reduces independence and increases centralisation. A better recipe for foolishness in a society would be hard to imagine.
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Compassionate Conservatism by Jesse Norman and Janan Ganesh was published by Policy Exchange last week. www.jessenorman.com