More than 200 election candidates still haven’t been picked – here’s why

Good morning. It’s less than six weeks until the election, and less than two weeks until the deadline for nominations – but in seats all over the UK, many voters don’t know who their candidates will be.

Partly because the timing of the vote was a secret known to only a few in Downing Street, the Tories have about 190 candidates left to announce – including replacements for retiring big beasts like Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom – and Labour, after a hectic weekend of announcements, 31. The SNP have a full house in Scotland, but the Lib Dems, Reform UK and the Greens still have places to fill. There may be more retirements to come in safe seats, too – and so a decent number of the MPs who will sit in the next parliament aren’t even in contention yet.

That means that the identity of the outstanding candidates matters – and so does the process that the parties have been using to fill their lists until now. But because of the sheer number, and the decline in local journalism, these selections are strikingly underreported.

Michael Crick, the former Channel 4 News and Newsnight political journalist, has been fighting a one-man battle to correct that, largely through an account on X, formerly Twitter, called @tomorrowsmps. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to him about why selections matter, the nominations still to come, and what it all means for who will represent us after 4 July.

PS: From next Monday, I’ll be writing an afternoon newsletter on the campaign with the imaginative title of Election Edition. Sign up here to get it in your inbox at 5pm every weekday. I’d offer loyal readers a discount, but it’s free. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘The parties use this excuse of it being late in the day to impose people – it can cause resentment’

Michael Crick’s brain is an almost bottomless repository of stories about selection skullduggery from elections past, and he is enthusiastic to tell you them. “Well, you know Margaret Thatcher was elected on a fiddle,” he says. “It’s all in Charles Moore’s biography. When she went for her seat in Finchley in 1958, she lost by a couple of votes. But the chairman of the local party thought she was wonderful, so he lost a couple of votes for the other fellow.” On such dubious foundations are careers launched – or blown up.

There has been plenty of controversy this time around, too. Here’s Crick’s guide to the state of play.

Is it normal to have this many candidates chosen this late?

To a layperson, the two main parties being over 200 candidates short this close to an election sounds utterly chaotic. “Oh, it’s perfectly normal,” Crick said. “In fact, the parties are way ahead of where they were in 2019. What you have to remember is that nearly all the ones left are the ones where they don’t have a hope of winning, where it’ll make bugger-all difference to who the MP is in the end.”

But it’s also true that there a number of seats where the candidates will have a real prospect of becoming MPs, with the ailing governing party perhaps unsurprisingly in a worse state: by Crick’s count, the Conservatives lack candidates in 32 seats they currently hold, more than Labour needs across the entire country. About half the seats Labour still has to pick are winnable. There may also be more retirements to come, some in plum constituencies.

This close to the election, the central parties take much closer control of the process than they do further out – which tends to favour those close to the centres of power. Guido Fawkes reported on Thursday that Sunak’s political secretary James Forsyth, Downing Street deputy chief of staff Will Tanner, and former Evening Standard editor Emily Sheffield – David Cameron’s sister-in-law – are among the hopefuls. Labour Uncut meanwhile reports that senior Starmer aide Morgan McSweeney is being lined up for a seat in Wigan.

“The parties do use this excuse of it being late in the day to impose people,” Crick said. “But when it happens, it can cause huge resentment locally.”

How has the Labour selection process gone so far?

Starmer has faced fierce criticism from the left of the party because of what looks like a very deliberate pattern: strong left-wing candidates disqualified for questionable reasons, the better to discard the Corbyn legacy.

These candidates are usually weeded out through a “due diligence” process controlled from the centre that picks up on issues that may appear spurious. Lauren Townsend, who had the endorsement of six trade unions, missed out in Milton Keynes North after she liked a post on X from Nicola Sturgeon saying that she had tested negative for Covid (and, to be fair, another questioning Starmer’s fitness for office). Maurice McLeod was excluded in Camberwell and Peckham for historic social media activity from before he became a councillor – including liking a post by Green MP Caroline Lucas.

There are no examples of prospective candidates on the right of the party being disqualified for similar reasons. Luke Akehurst, who plays a central role in the process and is firmly on the party’s right, accepts that there “is a political element to this” and told PoliticsHome last year: “If we were in a very tight parliament, a hung parliament situation, or a very narrow Labour majority in the next election, I don’t want to have allowed people to become Labour MPs that effectively are not solid votes for the Labour Party … We’ve got to have a degree of unity and internal discipline.”

“I am hugely critical of how they’ve done it,” Crick said. “They’ve purged the left, and they’ve done it by accusations that would not be a problem for anyone on the right – ruthlessly dredging minor things up from their career. The people running the show are hugely partisan. My own politics are right-wing Labour, but I’m a pluralist. Good governments need internal challenge.”

In general, he added, “the Labour candidate list is rather boring – all the most interesting ones are in unwinnable seats.” He thinks that Labour figures like John Prescott, Robin Cook, and Angela Rayner would not have been selected as candidates under the current regime.

What about the Tories?

On the Conservative side, any sense of a new order will come just as much from who loses their seats as the relatively few new candidates who get parachuted into winnable ones. “Assuming they lose most of the red wall seats, I suspect that might actually mean the party feels a bit closer to the centre than it does now,” Crick said. “The people they’ve chosen this time around who have a chance of coming into parliament are not as right wing. And there are some on the right of the party who think that they are deliberately being excluded.”

He points to some prominent remainers in at least conceivably winnable seats: Charlie Davis in Eltham, who wanted a second referendum; James Cracknell, the former Olympic rower, who says that Britain could rejoin the EU in a generation; and Rupert Harrison, who was chief of staff to George Osborne.

“With quite a lot of the less well-known candidates, it’s hard to work out their politics precisely if there’s not a visible record,” Crick said. “They will sort of conceal it as a candidate when they’re asked and it’ll only become apparent when they get to Westminster. But I do think it’s safe to say that the list is not chock-a-block with prominent right-wingers. And the Brexit divide is not as important as it was in 2019.”

Why does all of this matter?

Crick has two main motivations: his concerns over the calibre of candidates being signed up, and his view that all of this is a crucial engine of power in the UK that goes largely overlooked.

“One of the big problems is the obsession with having a local candidate,” he said. “Both sides are just infected with it. That leaves constituencies with very limited pools, and it frustrates very good people seeking seats. But there is no evidence that being from the area, or being a former councillor, helps you be a good MP – and the truth is that being an MP should not be about dealing with the constituency problems as much as holding the executive to account, scrutinising legislation, and perhaps being in government.”

Meanwhile, Crick’s work has arguably started to influence the process in its own right: candidates who might once reasonably have hoped that they could quietly apply for multiple seats now have to worry that the @tomorrowsmps account reveals their claims of devotion to a particular area as hollow – and count against them with local parties.

“Some of my friends think I’m absolutely mad to follow all this,” he said. “I don’t make any money. But I just love it! It’s all about how raw power is really exercised – and there just aren’t that many local journalists any more to cover it. And the moment someone gets chosen for a winnable seat is the turning point in their political career. I’m going to do this for the rest of my life, or for as long as my brain works.”

What else we’ve been reading

• “It’s a miracle I don’t have PTSD after my early years in parliament”: in the latest in a series of interviews with soon-to-be-former MPs, Zoe Williams speaks to Harriet Harman (above) about taking a battering from Thatcher in the Commons, and how Sunak lost control. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters

• Nesrine Malik’s column is on the stakes of the international criminal court’s arrest warrant requests for Israeli and Hamas leaders. By dismissing the severity of the charges, she writes, “how are the United States and its partners ever to make a convincing case again that their rules are fair, universal, and so must be followed by all?”. Nimo

• Joel Golby examines our collective obsession with ratings and reviews (I for one cannot make a choice on where to eat without knowing if a restaurant has a 4.5 or above Google rating) and turns the critical lens on his own life. Nimo

• Forget the evening news or the newspaper front pages: the real media battleground in this election will be the BBC’s breaking news alerts. Jim Waterson’s piece sets out how much influence the national broadcaster’s news app has quietly amassed, and new efforts to insure the alerts’ impartiality during the campaign. Archie

• Don’t read this if you are about to eat, have just eaten, or get queasy easily: penis fillers have rocketed in popularity. For the Cut (£), David Mack tries to find out what is behind the boom. Nimo

Sport

Football | Southampton (above) made a glorious return to the Premier League at the first time of asking, defeating Leeds 1-0 in the Championship playoff final thanks to Adam Armstrong’s 24th-minute goal. Saints manager Martin said after the game that his first ­promotion as a manager was “the best feeling I’ve had in football”.

Tennis | Andy Murray was swept aside by Stan Wawrinka 6-4, 6-4, 6-2 in the first round of the French Open, saying “I wish I could have done a little bit better” of what may well be his last appearance at the tournament. Meanwhile, Naomi Osaka came through three turbulent sets against Lucia Bronzetti to move into the second round with a 6-1, 4-6, 7-5 victory. The victory marks Osaka’s first win in a grand slam match since January 2022.

Formula One | Charles Leclerc won the Monaco Grand Prix, the Ferrari driver taking his first victory at his home race and becoming the first Monégasque to win here since the world championship began in 1950. Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, the world champion, could only finish sixth.

The front pages

General election campaigning once again dominates the fronts pages. The Guardian leads with “Sunak’s national service plan is ‘bonkers’, says ex-military chief”. The Financial Times follows the same story with “Sunak steps up national service push as campaign stutters stir Tory dismay”.

The Mail reports “Rishi fights back after his national service plan is ridiculed”. The Telegraph says “Young royals face national service in Sunak plan”, while the Mirror characterises the proposed policy as “Desperate”.

The i claims “Labour plan to rebuild Britain will rely on private finance”. The Times leads with “Labour: We will act fast to win trust on security”.

Today in Focus

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The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

Marlene Flowers struggled with body image for most of her life. The problems escalated over the years, eventually reaching a crisis point when an eating disorder left her hospitalised.

Concerned for her wellbeing, her youngest son encouraged her to start viewing food as a way to keep fit. Over the course of five years, Flowers built her confidence back up, first at home and then in the local gym. She was getting stronger, too, and decided to document her journey online. The new fitness routine became a full-blown passion, with Flowers signing up to a bodybuilding contest. At 67, Flowers has won five bodybuilding trophies and has gained sponsorship from clothing brand YoungLA, making her the oldest sponsored female athlete in the US.

It’s not just about the accolades: the world of bodybuilding has given Flowers a new community to rely on. “My new friends in the bodybuilding industry have become my family,” she says. “They genuinely care. It’s wonderful to fit in and I’m breaking the stigma for others too. Even in our local gym, I’m noticing older people joining. I now have more self confidence than I’ve ever had in my whole life.”

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Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

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