Anna Soubry has warned of a risk of entryism in the party as the pro-Brexit group Leave.EU encourages its supporters to become members in order to back Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg if a leadership contest were to take place.
Conservative party rules mean anyone who has been a member for more than three months can vote in a leadership contest. Grassroots members have the final say between a pair of candidates, selected by Conservative MPs in a series of ballots.
Leave.EU is said to have 88,000 supporters, and is urging them to “flood” the Tory party to elect a “true Brexiteer” such as Johnson or Rees-Mogg.
Soubry has said: “These people are absolutely dedicated to their cause. And you don’t need an awful lot of people to make a huge amount of difference – so it’s really worrying. Some of it is people who over Europe felt they no longer support us and went off to Ukip and are now rejoining the party.”
Her fellow MPs Nicky Morgan and Phillip Lee have also sounded the alarm, with Morgan backing a call from the one nation Tory Reform Group to its supporters, urging them to check their membership is up to date.
The latest published figures showed Tory membership at 124,000, making it less than a quarter of the size of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party and shows that a relatively small number of activists could influence the outcome of a poll.
Politics Professor Tim Bale said: “It does seem like quite a sensible thing for people to do, if they’re ideologically obsessed with Brexit.
What we do know is that quite a lot of people joined immediately after Brexit, assuming that there was going to be a leadership contest, so there is a precedent. It’s difficult to believe that the membership would elect a remainer anyway, so it’s all about the degree of Brexit that they’re going to get from any leader.”
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