Mel Stride: ‘The Tories should learn from the unions. All our members get are demands for more cash’

The Conservative leadership hopeful on why the party must win back its ‘neglected’ membership – and how a war hero continues to inspire him

As a qualified pilot, Mel Stride knows exactly what to do to recover from a life-threatening tailspin. Next week he will find out whether Tory MPs believe he also has what it takes to pull the Conservative Party out of its dangerously steep nosedive.
On Wednesday, the parliamentary party will hold its first round of voting on who should be the next Tory leader, when the candidate with the fewest votes will drop out of the race. The bookies think that person will be Stride, with odds as long as 40-1, but the shadow work and pensions secretary reckons he knows better.
“I’m quietly confident, though I’m not taking anything for granted,” he tells me when we meet in the atrium of Portcullis House, the 1990s extension to the Palace of Westminster. He says people are “definitely” underestimating him, and his opponents will be aware that as a former government whip, he knows how to count.
What makes the current leadership contest fascinating is that none of the candidates has managed to open up a significant lead, leaving it ripe for unexpected twists and plenty of intrigue. With just 121 Tory MPs, it is difficult for any of the six to pull away from the others at this early stage, and next week’s vote will be the first time we get a true indication of who holds a strong hand and who is bluffing.
All of the candidates had to have at least 10 backers to make it this far: Stride has six who have publicly endorsed him, two more than Dame Priti Patel or James Cleverly, and the same number as Tom Tugendhat. Only Robert Jenrick (11) and Kemi Badenoch (eight) have more public backing.
Rival camps have tried to portray 62-year-old Stride as the also-ran in the contest, a man who stepped up in order to increase his profile and with it his chances of being made shadow chancellor. Some had even tried to suggest he would pull out of the contest, but as he sips black coffee from a paper cup it becomes abundantly clear he is serious about winning.
“I’m getting a hugely positive response from hustings,” Stride says. “I’ve now stood up and addressed between 1,000 and 2,000 members, and I tend to hear afterwards, ‘you had a lower profile than some of the other people we’ve been looking at, but today has been a revelation, and I will support you’. I’m getting lots of that, so the more exposure I can get, I think the better it is.
“Often in contests, it’s about momentum, isn’t it, and I think there’s a lot of scope for some momentum, particularly once you get through those first two rounds.”
By Sept 11 Tory MPs will have voted out two of the six candidates, with the remaining four going through to an intensive round of hustings events, culminating in the party conference at the end of September. MPs will then vote out two more candidates, leaving party members to choose between the final two by the end of October.
Badenoch, the shadow housing secretary, is seen as the woman to beat, but her critics believe it is possible that MPs will squeeze her out of the contest before it goes to the members, amid concerns about her temperament. Stride will not speak ill of any of his opponents, but he will be hoping those predictions prove to be correct.
He describes himself as the dark horse of the contest, but can he really go from last to first?
“David Cameron was 25-1 with the bookies before he made that conference speech,” he says, referring to the passionate, promptless address to party members in 2005 that convinced them to back the 39-year-old, who had never served in government, over the more experienced David Davis, then 56. Although Stride is the oldest of the six candidates, he believes that, like Cameron, he has the most to gain from wider exposure.
“Once you get down to that final four there will be the opportunity to stand up at conference and make your pitch,” he says. “I will get far more exposure there and in the media. There’ll be televised debates, and that is an area in which I think I’m strong.”
It is certainly true that during the general election campaign, Stride was the go-to minister for the relentless morning broadcast rounds (he says he did a quarter of them) while others, including Badenoch and Dame Priti, were largely absent.
Despite his media exposure during the election, he came within a whisker of losing his Central Devon seat. His 2019 majority of 17,721 collapsed, and he held on with a majority of just 61, partly because of a strong showing for Reform UK.
He insists that the answer to the threat of Reform is not to “get into bed with Nigel Farage,” and not to “go down the populist route.” Instead, he says, “you totally respect Reform voters and their concerns,” coming up with answers on tax, net migration and small boats, as well as rebuilding trust in the Conservatives that was lost during the Johnson and Truss premierships.
Reform has strong appeal to young voters, and Stride says the Tories will lose again if they do not bring down the “crossover age” at which people become more likely to vote Tory than Labour from the current age of 63 to below 40, as it was in 2019.
That will require innovative policies that show young people “how a low tax Britain can be on their side,” he says. One idea he has had is to exempt people starting their first job from their first £5,000 of National Insurance payments, instead diverting the money into an ISA that can help them towards a deposit on their first home.
To help pay for it, he has already identified £12 billion of savings that can be made by reducing the welfare bill, including reforms of personal independence payments (PIPs) to get more people off benefits and into work. Stride believes Sir Keir Starmer is making a huge mistake by refusing to even mention benefits reform.
With five years of opposition ahead of the Tories, there is plenty of time to formulate policies, he says, but the far more urgent job is to rebuild the famous election-winning machine that the Conservative Party was once so famous for, as it is vital to start the road to recovery with gains in next May’s local elections.
He believes the party membership, the very foundation of every past success, has been terribly neglected of late.
“They pay £39 a year and their only real interaction from the centre is a stream of emails asking for more cash.
“I think we could learn from the – dare I utter the words – trade unions in terms of how they look after their members, give them value and the manner and nature of engagement.”
Any organisation with more than 170,000 members, he says, should be able to attract partners that would offer exclusive access to events, for example. He also wants to show local associations the respect that has been lacking for some time, no longer “parachuting in candidates at the last minute and without their approval.”
In the longer term, he believes Conservative campaign headquarters must find a way to digitise data down to the level of individual councillors so that iPads replace clipboards on the doorstep and canvassers can give voters instant information on what their local councillor is or isn’t doing about issues that most concern them. If a resident is worried about the state of pavements, for example, a Tory canvasser should be able to look up data there and then on what is being done, and text or email it to the person they are speaking to.
Stride did not become an MP until he was 48. Like all of the other leadership candidates, he has considerable real world experience, which in his case involved setting up an exhibitions and publishing business from scratch. He spent a year in the US setting up a subsidiary there, which he subsequently sold, and he and his wife Michelle – with whom he has three daughters – still have a controlling interest in Venture Marketing Group in the UK.
I ask if that means he is rich, and if that is a problem in modern-day politics.
He says: “What we Conservatives have got to do is champion aspiration, opportunity and achievement. There was a time when we were supremely good at doing that, and that is a flame that’s got to burn brighter. I started with nothing, and I built everything that I have in life, and I’m very proud of that. I want more people to do it, and I want more people to benefit from that kind of society.
“And in creating wealth, of course, you employ people, you generate income, so you keep the economy going, you pay tax, which funds public services. So I’m deeply proud of those achievements.”
He says his time as the boss of his own company also taught him a valuable skill: leadership. He believes the single most important factor in getting the Tories back into power will be leadership, and that building a company from scratch, as well as running the biggest spending department in Government – the Department for Work and Pensions, which employs 90,000 people and spends £280 billion a year – makes him uniquely qualified.
His two biggest heroes are John F Kennedy, whose space race mantra of doing things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” provided his inspiration as an entrepreneur, and Field Marshal William Slim, who led the Fourteenth Army, sometimes called the “Forgotten Army,” in the Burma campaign in the Second World War.
Slim, later created a viscount, inherited a demoralised army which was forced to withdraw to India after being pushed out of Burma by the Japanese, but under Slim’s command it held off the Japanese advance into India and launched a counter-offensive to retake Burma.
Slim’s leadership style, says a misty-eyed Stride, was about “raising the game of every single individual, getting them individually to raise their sights, giving them confidence and working with people and respecting their opinions. But once you’ve made a decision and you know where you’re going, you absolutely drive for the line.”
Slim’s stirring memoir was titled Defeat Into Victory, and Stride firmly believes that with the right leader, the Tories can turn around their own fortunes before the next general election. “Labour’s position is far more precarious than it appears at first blush,” he says, citing the fact that Starmer came to power with just 34 per cent of the popular vote, the lowest for a winning party since 1918. 
“Politics is volatile, but I take the Keith Joseph view, that many of these things that are scattered across the political spectrum as being to the left, to the right, largely sit in the common ground.
“We should be driving for lower taxes, we’ve got to get on top of net migration, we’ve got to have a compelling plan that’s going to sort out illegal migration.”
Is he the most moderate of the six candidates?
“I think I’m the one who potentially could have the most appeal to the wider electorate,” he says, as we discuss whether Tory members will end up choosing a leader with broad appeal or simply the most right-wing person to get to the final two. “It’s not about which hue of blue you are,” he insists, adding that: “There might be a tendency to do things that are appealing very directly to the membership, or a subset of the membership, which then become a problem in terms of delivering unity and a united party.”
One of those things, he says, involves the European Convention on Human Rights. Willingness to leave the ECHR has become something of a litmus test for candidates’ right-wing credentials, but Stride believes the decision must be one for the party as a whole, not any one individual.
“We know that a section of the membership are very concerned about the ECHR,” he says, “and I understand why that’s the case. Equally, there are a variety of different views on that matter amongst the parliamentary party, and the first thing a leader has got to do is unite that party. Therefore it would seem only logical to me to work towards our settled opinion on that matter by working with the parliamentary party and coming to that conclusion.”
This sounds a lot like Rishi Sunak’s position on the ECHR, which may not be surprising, given that Stride ran his leadership campaign, but he bridles at the suggestion he is the “continuity Rishi” candidate. Without specifying Sunak’s five pledges – which included stopping the boats and cutting NHS waiting lists – Stride says “setting up some of our metrics for success in the way that we did, with hindsight, set us up for some element of failure.”
After such a dreadful defeat in the election, one of the most frequently mentioned names in Tory circles is Lord Houchen, whose reelection as Tees Valley Mayor in May was one of the only bright spots in an otherwise dismal year.
Stride would have him in his shadow cabinet if he became leader, advising on, among other things, devolution of power to the regions. “We have made a great success of devolution, and I think we can go still further,” he says, also namechecking former West Midlands Mayor Andy Street, who was narrowly defeated by Labour’s Richard Parker after seven years in the job.
“I want to take what Ben [Houchen] has done and see how much further we can actually push it, and what Andy did in his time,” Stride adds, saying he would like to give metro mayors more freedom in how they spend their budgets, rather than ringfencing funds. Houchen set up the first mayoral development corporation outside London, with a plan to create 20,000 jobs in and around the deep water Teesport, and took the struggling Teesside Airport back into public ownership, earning a reputation for getting things done.
If Stride fails to win the leadership, he will not be short of hobbies to fill his spare time. He is a qualified scuba diver and a qualified British Museum tour guide (for the record, he believes the Elgin Marbles should stay in London).
And, of course, there is flying. Stride qualified as a pilot during his stint in the US in the 1990s, and says there is “no greater buzz” than flying solo for the first time.
Before we part, I ask him about the dramatic pictures of a light aircraft that crash landed on the A419 in Gloucestershire earlier this week, and he becomes animated as he describes the procedure for making a forced landing on a public road (among other things, always land in the direction in which the traffic is travelling).
He also tells me how to get out of a tailspin if you lose power and find yourself corkscrewing vertically towards the ground: use the rudder to stop the spin, and only then pull back on the yoke to pull out of the dive. 
It may not be a skill that is directly applicable to running a political party, but if Conservative MPs want a leader who can remain calm in a crisis, it might be worth giving Mel Stride another look.