Alex Clarkson stood in 2024 as the Conservative candidate for Stevenage. Pinder Chauhan stood in 2024 as the Conservative candidate for Bedford & Kempston.

 It’s been pointed out before in these pages, but there isn’t really an organisation for Conservative parliamentary candidates. There’s the 1922 for MPs, the CCA for councillors, associations for members.

But nothing for candidates.

And yet, at the next election there will be four times more Tory candidates running for a seat than Tory MPs trying to defend one. So Conservatives Together (CTog) was founded last year, to support and represent this group. It is, after all, perhaps the most important source of new energy, ideas and leaders.

In the time since the election, the CTog team has been studying the perspectives of our 2024 candidates. So far, three headlines have come out of that work (as well as some private research provided to key figures in the party this week).

The first headline is that Labour’s majority is big but thin – if just 2% more of the electorate had voted for us, we’d still have 345 seats – a resounding victory. A stronger Conservative campaign at every level might not have retained an actual majority (the problems went much deeper than that), but it might have stemmed the flood and limited the disaster.

In the same report, CTog heard from candidates who repeatedly highlighted the weakness of our arguments. It’s as though we had a collective amnesia for the main talking points of Conservative governing philosophy. Perhaps we leaned too heavily on Boris’ panache, or perhaps there was too much baggage after 14 years in government, but one way or another we forgot how to ‘speak Tory’ in a way that appealed. It’s the language of Thatcher, Scruton, Burke, and we lost the Rosetta Stone.

There’s no doubt that Reform is brilliant at highlighting many problems that voters face, in language that strikes a chord. But be in no doubt, Reform may be ‘of the Right’, but it isn’t a Conservative alternative. It is not trying to present serious ideas to solve our underlying problems. Its first instinct is to tax farmers, ban new technologies and spend wildly on things that raise your family’s energy bills. The answer is not to become some version of Reform, but to rebuild the case for Conservative ideas.

And Labour? They didn’t even try to articulate a vision for government. They only had a strategy to win an election, by ‘not being the Tories’. There was no clear agenda on offer beyond managerialism, raiding businesses for cash and playing class warfare, and their performance in office lays that bare.

There is a void to be filled here, and it starts with campaigns and communication. We must not only build a fresh policy agenda. We also need to learn to sell it to voters. And that means learning to campaign better than we have for many years. We have to be broader than Reform’s overdependence on Farage, more in-touch with real people than Labour, and deeper than the Libs’ cynical dodgy graphs.

CTog’s second headline finding was that Conservative candidates had a rough time last year, and it was a lonely experience. As two people who stood in 2024 ourselves, we can vouch for that.

A candidate is out there, their own name on the ballot, their own photo on the leaflets, energising dedicated-but-weary activists, assuring donors, fending off the barbs of the opposition. All of this is par for the course.

What is less inevitable is the sense of disconnection – from No10 surprising us with an early election, to CCHQ’s decisions on resource allocation that felt to some of us on the frontline like a rug being pulled. Even the selection process feels wrong: Too many candidates spent years trying to get on the list, only for SpAds to swoop in at the last minute. For others who did get in, the eleventh-hour nature of many selections undermined those candidates’ ability to build local relationships or camaraderie with nearby candidates.

Finally, CTog found that there are hundreds of candidates ready to go again. Despite the rough time they had, the spark of ambition isn’t dimmed. As we published last month, 90% of 2024 candidates want to go again (or are seriously considering it). Despite everything, we are buzzing with fresh ideas and energy. We want to get out there and pitch the Conservative case anew.

Those three insights – a shallow majority, a new cohort ready to begin, and a need to connect that cohort together – paint a clear picture. We need to invest properly in our candidates, starting right now.

That’s why we’re excited to announce the launch of the Conservatives Together Fellowship, a new six-month programme designed to create better campaigners and future leaders. This isn’t just another training course – it’s an intensive programme that will transform how we approach elections.

The Fellowship will select cohorts of 20 people at a time, focusing on parliamentary candidates preparing for the next election. Each cohort will receive hands-on training from senior politicians, experienced activists, and journalists. The programme will be competitive, maintaining high standards to ensure we develop the very best talent.

The training programme is based on what we need as candidates, rather than more general training for campaigners.

That includes things like how to build your public profile, how to think about a multi-year election strategy, how to mobilise donors and activists, how to work with the media, and much more. There’ll also be a chance to roll up our sleeves and work together on cutting-edge (as well as tried-and-tested) campaign techniques in the field. It will help candidates to grow in confidence, build our skills and networks, and become the engineers of a new election-winning machine.

Absolutely central to the Fellowship programme is the sense of having a support network. The clue is in the name. The sense of fellowship with a small group of nearby candidates, of a shared mission and responsibility to rebuild our party, is crucial to helping candidates to succeed. Rebuilding our party might be a daunting task, but it should feel more like teamwork than it has in the past.

This emphasis on training and empowering candidates is linked to the military idea of ‘Mission Command’ versus ‘Directive Command’. The British Army has long recognised the value of empowering officers and troops in the field (Mission Command), rather than insisting that they await orders from senior officers before doing anything different (Directive Command). By sharing the mission’s objectives and having the high-quality training and resources to make decisions in the field, armies can push forward faster and adapt to the fog of war. We depend too much on CCHQ and not enough on our people in the field. The Fellowship will help to address that.

We’re delighted to be two members of the first, founding cohort. But we know there are hundreds of others who want to get moving on their political journeys too, so more cohorts will launch throughout 2025. Anyone who wants to apply can find more information and the application link here.

When we think about the long history of this Party, it isn’t just its timeless ideals (“The facts of life are Conservative”) that assured its survival, but also its ability to renew itself over and over again. In every sense, it must embrace that process again. The Conservatives Together Fellowship is designed to do that: bring in new people, spread the best vote-winning techniques and skills, and create new opportunities to win.

The Conservative Party needs a new generation of campaigners. Through the CTog Fellowship, we’re going to build it.

More information about the Conservatives Together Fellowship, including how to apply, can be found at https://www.conservativestogether.org/#fellowship-intro

The post Alex Clarkson and Pinder Chauhan: Launching the network and training we wished we’d had last year appeared first on Conservative Home.