Tory leadership: Who gets to choose the UK’s next prime minister?

BBC News :

With Theresa May finally on her way out of Downing Street, a Tory leadership contest that has been bubbling under for months is now starting.

It’s a two-stage process. The first sees votes among Conservative MPs designed to whittle the contenders down to just two front-runners. The second stage sees the party’s grassroots members choose between them in a postal ballot.

In other words, it is members of the public – those who pay £25 a year to join the Conservative Party – who get the final say on who the next prime minister is. There will not be a general election because the party is already in power.

So, who are its members and what do they think on key issues, not least of course Brexit?

We don’t know exactly how many Conservative Party members there are because – unlike the UK’s other parties – the Conservatives don’t regularly release the figures.

The last time they did so was back in March 2018, when they put the figure at 124,000.

That’s larger than some of the more pessimistic guesstimates, but way down on the peak of nearly three million that the party boasted in the early 1950s.

Membership plunged after that before levelling off at around one million in the 1970s and 1980s, since when it has been dropping almost inexorably.

One thing we can be sure of, however, is that the Tories have far fewer members than the Labour Party.

Even if we assume that Labour’s membership has fallen from the late 2017 peak of more than 550,000, it still has a huge advantage over the Conservatives when it comes to campaigning on the ground.