Older, male, white: The 0.3% of voters who will pick Britain's leader

Boris Johnson, the front-runner among Conservative members to lead their party, at a campaign event in Manchester, England, on the weekend. Photo / AP

Having emptied their bowls of raspberries and cream, the Conservative Party members who had gathered in the garden of this Elizabethan manor house turned to face the dance floor. The smell of sheep grazing nearby drifted into the tent. A pile of raffle winnings — pruning shears, sparkling rosé — waited beside the bandstand. Near the end of the local Conservative association's 40th annual raspberry and wine night, the place went quiet as the chairman — man or woman, it's always chairman — announced the winning tickets.

But jazz, drink and festoons of Union Jacks were poor covers for the discontent coursing through the party membership in Kettering, a town in central England that voted six-to-four in favor of Britain's leaving the European Union. Gathered here were three dozen of the 160,000 or so party members who will choose the next Conservative leader and, therefore, prime minister, giving them unparalleled power to determine their country's fate as it careens through the Brexit crisis.

This sliver of the population, just 0.3 per cent of registered voters, is mostly white, ageing and male. And it is poised to use its new clout — the party's grassroots have never before picked a prime minister — to catapult Boris Johnson into Downing Street, potentially cleaving the world's oldest and most successful political party as it sends Britain on the path to what could be a tumultuous Brexit.

As the Brexit mess has unfolded, Conservatives have grown ever more impatient, ever more fixated on leaving the European Union, come what may. Most members said in recent polling by YouGov that leaving the bloc was worth enduring significant damage to the economy, secession by Scotland and Northern Ireland and even a shattering of the Conservative Party itself.

Johnson is therefore preaching to the choir in promising to pull Britain out of the European Union by the latest deadline of October 31, "do or die." With that hard Brexit stance, he is widely expected to win the leadership contest over his more technocratic rival, Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, and then become prime minister because the Conservatives have a small working majority in Parliament.

In interviews over the past two weeks, some members said they worried that Johnson was a "bumbler," making different promises to different audiences and leaving a trail of misbehaviour, notably a recent fight with his partner that led neighbours to call the police. But far more dismissed that fracas as a "Remainer conspiracy" to block the rise of a hard-line Brexiteer, evidence of desperate rivals reaching into "the gutter" to short-circuit Johnson's rise.

Under the white tent in Kettering, members said that Johnson was the last hope of a languishing party. They were beyond fed up with the uncertain stewardship of Prime Minister Theresa May and, three years after voting for Brexit, impatient for lawmakers to stop pushing their own, milder plans for the split.

"Sometimes, members of Parliament forget they are our servants, and they are there to do our bidding," said Susan Jacobi, 77, sitting at a lace-trim tablecloth. "I think they get a bit above themselves."

"I'll back you on that," said Floss Aldridge, 93, a veteran of the British navy during World War II. "Even if they don't agree with what we want, if we voted them in, they're supposed to do that. The last lot, they were just doing their own thing."

Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, is competing with Boris Johnson for the leadership. Photo / AP

By the "last lot," she meant lawmakers who opposed a no-deal Brexit — and especially May, who members complain was effectively "coronated" as party leader in 2016 because her rival in the final stages dropped out, depriving them of a vote. This time, they are vowing not to be ignored, and Johnson has taken pains to drop in on local association meetings even as he dodges public debates.

"Our one moment of glory, as it were, is electing the leader, as well as nominating our local member of Parliament," said Paul Marks, the chairman of the Kettering Conservatives. "You take that away from us, we don't like it."

Conservative membership has plunged since the 1950s, leaving behind a small core of politically active and increasingly right-wing supporters. Once effectively a social club where the upper classes mingled with their representatives and perhaps met a spouse, the party has remade itself as class-based politics fragmented and voters realigned themselves by education levels and age.

Beryl and David Booth, sitting beside Jacobi in Kettering, applied for membership in 1984, principally so they could socialise at the local Conservative club, a manor house that hosted music and raffles of fresh meats. They occasionally got the ear of local lawmakers, but otherwise were content to let the all-powerful leadership take the reins on political matters.

A thumping Conservative defeat in the late 1990s, however, forced party leaders to at least feign democratic changes. In the main, that consisted of giving members the final vote on leadership candidates after the party's 300 or so serving lawmakers whittled the field of contenders to two.

But members are now agitating to win more sway. They take credit for helping chase May out of office by organising a vote of no-confidence in her leadership by senior members, said Greig Baker, the chairman of the Canterbury Conservatives. Now, in return for their annual fees of 25 pounds, some are asking for a direct vote on policy and new rights to depose their leader, reasoning that the Brexit referendum opened a floodgate to public input in British politics.

"The party has to have some mechanism by which membership can actually kick the party leader very hard up the backside," said Frank Dowling, 70, sitting beside Baker at a pub, "possibly to the point of booting them out." Canterbury, a cathedral city in southeast England, was held by Conservatives for 100 years before Labour seized it in 2017 — a defeat some members blame on May.

The idea of Conservative lawmakers becoming mouthpieces of the membership has already transformed the party.

Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics, said, "There was always a part of the left that strongly believed members of Parliament should take instructions from, or at the very least give a good hearing to, the opinions of local party members." But, he said, "Brexit has galvanised many Conservative Party members into the feeling that they, too, need to have more control over the voting habits of their members of Parliament."

For now, though, attention is focused on how a new leader could revive the party, or put it at risk of being torn in half.

One of the great concerns among Conservatives is the rise of the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage, the former leader of the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party. Photo / AP

One of the great concerns among Conservatives is the rise of the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage, the former leader of the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party. The Brexit Party crushed the Conservatives in the European elections last month with its message of Brexit at any cost. Johnson is seen as far and away the best equipped to blunt that charge. But some members fear that in the process, the party could permanently lose moderate voters, and they even question their own power in choosing a prime minister.

"I think it's wrong that only 160,000 should represent the voting population," one member, Peter Lord, said in Kettering.

A no-deal Brexit, seen as the salvation of the party by some members, looks to others like its ruin. Economists warn it could drive up food prices, cost jobs, choke off the supply of medicines and badly disrupt British industry.

"It scares my mum, and I don't want anything that scares my mum," Jo Bartley, 49, a Conservative in Canterbury, said. "I think as a party, we should avoid things that scare people."

Bartley is in the minority, with two-thirds of members preferring a no-deal Brexit.

Roughly 40 per cent of the party's members are older than 65, according to research led by Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, whose coming book on the members is called "Footsoldiers." And they are disproportionately wealthy.

On social issues, many Conservative members express unease about changes in British life. Four in 10 want to reduce the number of Muslim immigrants and prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister, according to a recent poll. And a majority of members support the death penalty, abolished in Britain for decades.

Many members, though, are already looking beyond Brexit toward the next election. Britons in general see Hunt as the more palatable prime minister, opinion polls suggest, but members have clung to the opposite conviction: that Johnson, as unpredictable as he may be, is the only leader with the gusto to defeat Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party.

"We've had three years of totally dreary, charmless leadership, with no conviction, no spontaneity, no humour," said Richard Jackson, a member in Kettering, as the two-man jazz band packed up for the night. "He's the light at the end of the tunnel, for all his faults."

Whether Johnson breaks members' hearts or keeps his word, though, is anyone's guess. Across the dance floor, Beryl Booth, the longtime member, said choosing him was a leap into the unknown.

"I think Boris Johnson will get us out," she said nervously, "but on what terms, I don't know."

Written by: Benjamin Mueller

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