Some say CCHQ are having trouble getting Tory activists to do Euro-canvassing, not true, look that at chap on the right having fun at a CCHQ phone canvassing session cajoling people to vote for his wife. CCHQ has summoned all staff to a meeting this evening. Expect them to be pressured to toil for Tory votes in the Euro elections. Good luck with that…

It’s not just CCHQ, West Midlands Tories are so desperate for volunteers that Regional Chairman Jim Cooper has sent everyone on the local Westminster Candidates list an “URGENT” email begging them to help out their Euro counterparts. Cooper complains that the “response so far has been less than we had hoped” before giving the candidates a veiled threat motivational thought to take away:

“Our views on these Elections are irrelevant – this is about loyalty to the Conservative Party. As a member of the Party’s Candidates Committee I know how much loyalty is valued.”

How many Tory candidates will even be voting Tory this time round?

Donations to the Tories have been drying up, with both big Remain and Leave donors unhappy with the party’s leadership. Now CCHQ has started a new mainstream media ad blitz to recruit more members. If the comments section of MailOnline is anything to go by they might be wasting their remaining money…

After years of decline, The Sun is reporting that Tory membership is finally on the up again, with 30,000 new members joining in the last twelve months to push the numbers to a seven-year high of 150,000. Labour are still estimated to have over half a million…

Naturally, senior Tory officials are stoking fears of ‘entryism’ rather than celebrating the fact that the Tories finally have slightly more than a quarter of Labour’s membership numbers. One panicked CCHQ insider told The Sun: “We’re not going to be able to stop people joining up just to vote for a new leader now… the danger is it will become a free for all.” How will CCHQ deal with the horror of taking £25 each from people who support Tory Party policy?

There has been no evidence that a ‘Purple Momentum’ actually exists, in fact Tory Remainers have been just as overt at trying to encourage entryism among their own supporters – who don’t even support Tory policy. Where deselection bids have occurred they have been led by longtime disgruntled Tory members, not new arrivals…

As Prof Tim Bale notes, “leadership contests make brilliant recruiting sergeants”. Over 13 million people voted for the Tories in the last election. Why are paranoid CCHQ officials so sure that the relatively tiny number of 30,000 joiners aren’t simply natural Tories who allowed their memberships to lapse in the past but are determined to have a say over who the next leader is now? Particularly after how disastrous the current one has turned out to be…

UPDATE: One Tory source tells Guido: “Not only are CCHQ annoyed there’s so many people joining, they seem keen to see the back of members as well”. Existing members are reportedly just being unceremoniously dumped off mailing lists when they write in to say they’re considering quitting, rather than being persuaded to stay as would have happened when membership was managed locally in the past. How not to run a voluntary party 101…

Dominic Grieve, Beaconsfield’s current Tory MP, lost a local constituency association confidence motion by 182 to 131 against him. The Beaconsfield Conservative Association chairman says that, “He remains our Conservative MP but I will be speaking as soon as possible to my fellow officers and the Executive Council.” A vote of no confidence is not a deselection.

Grieve is a decent man, we all agree, courageous even. To ignore your supporters and act against their wishes has consequences in a democracy. Deselections are always unpleasant, without them or at least the threat of them, MPs would be completely untethered from their supporters. MPs of all parties often arrogantly detest their activist members, who generally tend to be politically further away from the mainstream and their own ordinary voters. This tension is always there, sometimes the link snaps. This is such a time.

Grieve’s arrogance was that he thought he could shift from promising his members – in writing – that he would respect the outcome of the referendum, to leading the efforts to thwart Brexit, without cost. Breaking your word to voters, particularly the ones who get out the vote for you, is risky.

George Osborne tweeted this morning that Dominic Grieve had been “deselected”, going on to say “The Tory leadership can stop any deselection if it wants – we frequently did. CCHQ should suspend the local party. Otherwise we are heading for a huge, historic split in the Tory Party.” As a matter of fact Osborne has got it wrong, Grieve has not been deselected – yet. It is a bit rich Osborne, who has been campaigning to get rid of the leader of the Conservative Party since 2017, now calling for party unity. It is also more than galling when a Tory grandee says the little people who deliver leaflets, raise funds, vote for the party should be ignored and steam-rollered. Assuming of course that Osborne is still even a Conservative Party member…

UPDATE: Some groups like Leave.EU have been trying to claim the credit for Grieve’s deselection – local members strongly dispute the idea that they had anything to do with it, although Guido understands that the grassroots Campaign for Conservative Democracy was involved. A local Tory source tells Guido:

“Last night was a case of local members, most of whom have been members for years, finally getting organised and rising up. It has nothing to do with so-called “blue wave entryism” which isn’t even a thing. We’ve seen no real rise in membership numbers at all to suggest it could have any sort of impact.

“The principal reason Beaconsfield members voted against Grieve was that they felt he had been dishonest with them; promising at his last re-selection meeting to honour the referendum result, and then doing everything he could to thwart it. It’s his duplicity which has led to this motion passing.”

Tory women have put this video out to call out abuse on social media ahead of International Women’s Day tomorrow. It’s all a bit hetero-normative though…

Following the suspension of 14 Tory members yesterday over Islamophobic and racist remarks, Tory Chairman Brandon Lewis has written to the party’s most senior activists to “re-affirm my commitment that discrimination, intimidating behaviour or abuse of any kind has absolutely no place in our organisation”. The letter has gone to everyone at the most senior level of the voluntary party – Regional Chairmen, Area Chairmen, Association Chairman and Conservative Group Leaders. Swift action from the Tories…