Fury over new rule that allows Tory members to change their leadership vote

Sir Iain, who is backing Ms Truss, said the electronic ballots are “just ludicrous”, adding: “It is complex and will lead to all sorts of challenges, no one will know whether someone voted or did it for them. There hasn’t been a dry run – these things are really complex. You don’t want to try it in the middle of an election for a prime minister.”

Separately, the Tory peer and election guru Lord Hayward on Saturday night urged Conservative party bosses to allow those who have allowed their membership to lapse due to disaffection with Boris Johnson to rejoin and cast a vote in the leadership election.

Only those who have been members for a minimum of three months prior to the close of the ballots can cast a vote.

In a letter to Andrew Stephenson MP, the chairman of the Party and to Darren Mott, its chief executive, he pointed out that these people are “obvious targets for re-recruitment” to the Party.

He explained that while he understands the need for the three-month rule to prevent entryism, it should not apply to those who have left the Party in the past 12 months since they are not, strictly speaking, “new” members.

“By offering this opportunity, the Party is not opening a pandora’s box of unknown individuals joining the party with political chicanery in mind. They would be giving the chance to the Party both to expand its membership and improve its finances,” he said.

A Conservative spokesman said: “As the ballot packs explicitly state, members only get one vote in this leadership contest. Should our ballot company receive a duplicate vote, only one vote will be counted.”

Well-off, white southerners

Definitive information about who the Conservative Party’s some 160,000 members are is difficult to come by since it is not officially published.

Polling from Opinium, published by Politico this week, found that the Conservative Party is perceived by the general public to be to the right of them when it comes to gender, race and trans equality.

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, London, who has spent the past decade studying the Party’s membership, said that the caricature of older, well-off, white southerners “isn’t so very far from the truth”.

Data from his research, published earlier this week by the Financial Times, shows a membership that in 2020 was more male, white, southern, Brexit-leaning and affluent than the population as a whole, as well as being older.

Nearly two-thirds of Tory members (63 per cent) are men, the research found, compared with just under half of the British population. More than three quarters (76 per cent) backed Brexit, against 52 per cent of voters as a whole.