The danger of member-driven parties is that they can take our politics to the extremes

Party democracy sounds like a good thing, and in many ways it is, but it has its dangers. We report today on the findings of Professor Tim Bale’s research into Conservative Party members. These are the people who will decide next month who will be our prime minister, and 77 per cent of them support Britain leaving the European Union without agreement.

In this respect, as in others, they are unrepresentative of the country for whom they are choosing a leader. Among the whole nation, support for a no-deal Brexit is a minority view – the view of a large and enthusiastic minority, but a minority nonetheless.

That is why this Conservative leadership election could end in tears. It will be the first time the members of any political party choose a prime minister without that choice being subjected to approval by the voters in a general election. Yet their choice is likely to set up a conflict between the new prime minister and parliament – a parliament that is more representative of the nation in its opposition to a no-deal Brexit.

Many Conservative MPs, and some former Conservative MPs now sitting as independents, complain about entryism – the influx of new members who might previously have been active in Ukip or the Brexit Party. Their fears were stoked by the boasts of Arron Banks, an associate of Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party, that his Leave.EU campaign encouraged people last year to join the Conservative Party to “make it Conservative again”.

Conservative Party membership has certainly risen – the party claims 160,000 are eligible to take part in the leadership contest, up from 124,000 a year ago. And Professor Bale’s research confirms that recent recruits to Conservative membership are markedly more in favour of a no-deal Brexit.

The fears of these MPs echo those of Labour MPs, who have seen the character of their party transformed over the past four years as membership has tripled to more than half a million (although it is now falling again). Those who disagree with the views driving the membership surge describe it as “entryism”; for most new recruits, it is party democracy reflecting the energy of hope.

The truth is that there is a fundamental clash between different concepts of democracy. The conflict has been latent since the special Labour conference at Wembley in 1981, which ended the exclusive right of Labour MPs to choose the party leader and handed it to an electoral college including trade unions and local party delegates.

The Conservatives copied their opponents in 1998 and the first time they used the new system, in 2001, they managed to elect a leader, Iain Duncan Smith, who would not have been chosen had the decision remained with MPs. He did not last long.

In 2015, Labour went further, electing a leader who had struggled to secure the support of 15 per cent of the party’s MPs, which was the threshold required to put Jeremy Corbyn’s name on the ballot paper. At least it can be said in Mr Corbyn’s defence that his leadership brought real change – and that if he had become prime minister at the last election it would have been with the support of the wider electorate.

There will be no such popular endorsement before Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt takes office on 24 July. And the centrifugal force of member-led democracy means that whoever becomes prime minister will be committed to keeping open an option – a no-deal Brexit – that does not command wide and stable support across the country.

Party democracy is having its moment now. But parliamentary democracy is ultimately superior, and MPs of all parties and none must prepare to stand against the extremism of ideological no-deal Brexiteers and defend the national interest.