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

With the proviso that Mel Stride is a fully qualified pilot, it will come as no surprise to know that he is perfectly aware of how to pull an aircraft out of a spin! Next week, he will get to know if he is also deemed to have what it took for Tory MPs to pull out the Conservative Party out from this slope that is perilously positioned at 24 percent. 
 
 On Wednesday the parliamentary party will vote on who should be the next Tory leader in the first ballot of today’s elimination system and the candidate with the least votes will be out of the race. For the bookies it will be Stride at 40-1, but the shadow work and pensions secretary seems to know better. 
 
 He admits to being alive to this reality today much as he remains cautiously optimistic, “I’m quietly confident though I’m not unduly complacent”, he tells me in the atrium of the Portcullis House, the Palace of Westminster modern facelift constructed in the 1990s. He says that people are “definitely” underestimating him and his opponents will understand that as a former Government whip, he knows his numbers. 
 
 Whereas in previous leadership contests one of the candidates leapt ahead of the pack, this time none of them has been able to take a commanding lead and thus there is much uncertainty and quite a lot of surprises in store. Given the fact that any of the six candidates have only 121 Tory MPs to rely on, the next week vote will be the first time to determine whether any of the six knows he has a good hand and whether any of the remaining cards is a bluffer. 
 
 All of the candidates had to have at least 10 backers to make it this far: At the time of writing, Stride has six who have declared publicly that he is their preferred candidate, which is two more than Dame Priti Patel, one more than James Cleverly, and the same as Tom Tugendhat. More than half (15) of Conservative MPs have donated to the leadership campaign of Boris Johnson and five of the ten biggest publicly declared donors to his effort have donated more than once, while Matthew Hancock and Mark Spencer have contributed five figures each and Damian Hinds £ 4,000. 
 
 Opposing camps have sought to present 62-year-old Stride as the loser in the contest, a man who stood up in order to gain more visibility and with it the likelihood of being promoted to shadow chancellor. Some had gone a step further and attempted to<|reserved_special_token_265|> for him to quit the race , but as he takes the black coffee from a paper cup , one can get a glimpse of the fact that he wants to win the contest. 
 
 “I’m getting a hugely positive response from hustings,” Stride says. “I have been able actually to address between 1,000 and 2,000 members and what I normally get afterwards is, ‘You used to be quite low profile compared to some of the people we have been considering here, but today has been astounding and I will vote for you’. I’m getting lots of that, so the more exposure I can get I think the better it is. 
 
 “I think he added: “Often in contests, it’s about momentum is it not, and I think there’s lots of momentum once you get through early rounds. ” 
 
Tory MPs will have voted out two of the six candidates by the time of the Sept 11 ballot and the remaining four will then go through several exhaustive hustings events leading up to the final conclusion at the party conference at the end of the same month. Respondents explained that, firstly, earlier in July, the MPs will elect two candidates, and the second two will be voted out in August, and the final two contenders the rank and file of the party will select between them by end of October. 
 
Badenoch, the shadow housing secretary, is widely regarded as the front-runner but her detractors think that MPs may lock her out of the race before the members get a chance to vote as some of them find her abrasive. Stride will decline to have a bad word said about any of his opponents, but he will be praying those proclamations turn out to be true. 
 
He claims himself to be the outsider in the race, can he really change the tide and come from the rear? 
 
“David Cameron was 25-1 with the bookies before he made that conference speech,” he says, referring to the impassioned, unscripted address to party members in 2005 that persuaded them to support the 39-year-old who, until then, had had no governmental experience over the far more experienced David Davis, 56. But, unlike some of the other candidates, Stride asserts that because he is relatively older of the six, he is the one who can benefit most out of publicity similar to what Cameron achieved. 
 
“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 appear there more often and in the media – there will be debates that are on television, and I believe that I’m particularly good at those. ” 
 
During the general election campaign, Stride was the minister who never missed the morning broadcast, saying he did a quarter of them while there were dramatic absences from Key decision makers like Suella Braverman and Badenoch or Patel (now known as Dame Priti). 
 
Nevertheless, thanks to the free publicity your media gave him during the election, he nearly lost the Central Devon seat. His 2019 majority of 17,721 disintegrated and he clung on with a majority of 61 partly due to a good performance by Reform UK. 
 
He claims that ‘it’s not the answer to ‘get into bed with Nigel Farage’ or ‘go down the populist route. ’ While at the same time, he says: ‘you totally respect Reform voters and their concerns’,with answers on tax and net migration, small boats and solutions for trust in the Conservatives that was lost in Johnson and Truss administrations. 
 
Labour has great reference for reform signal Young voters, Tarin comments that the Tories are going to fail in the same ways again if they do not decrease the “crossover age”, at which people are more likely vote for Tories then for Labour, from 63 to below 40, as it was in the 2019. 
 
That will need some new approaches outlining to the youths how ‘a low tax Britain’ can support their initiatives, he stated. Perhaps his greatest idea so far has been to cut National Insurance for first-timers right from £5,000 and use that money to fund ISA for a deposit on first house. 
 
To fund it he has already outlined £12 billion of cuts as follows: Spending Review: Welfare Budget Reduction – Aims at cuts in personal independence payments and other payments to create more employment. Stride thinks that Sir Keir Starmer is rather making a massive error in not uttering the word ‘benefits reform’ at all. 

There is plenty of time to develop policies for the next five years of opposition to the Tories, as he says, but the more pressing concern is the reconstruction of an effective election strategy that once the Conservative Party boasted of possessing; it is important to begin the process of recovery with gains in the forthcoming local elections next May. 
 
He agrees with him and thinks that the party membership – the basis of each previous victory – has been almost abandoned recently. 
 
“They pay £39 a year and their only feeling endlessly bombarded by emails requesting more money. 
 
“There must be a way in which the ‘benefit society’ could learn from the – as Charles Muir would abhor me for suggesting this – trade unions inasmuch as their relations with their members, in as far as the provision of value as well as the mode and approach of engagement is concerned. ” 
 
He said that any organisation that has more than 170000 members should be in a position to secure partners that provided the kind of access to events for instance as those being provided by NAB. He also aims at regaining the respect of local associations believing that they should no longer be subjected to “having candidates dropped in on them at the last moment and without their consent. ” 
 
In the longer term, he said that Conservative campaign headquarters needs to be able to digitise data down to the level of local councillor so that, for instance, iPads take the place of clipboards during door-to-door campaigning and the canvassers can immediately provide the voter with information on what the local councillor is or isn’t doing in aspects most important to the concerned voter. If a resident is concerned about repair of Pavements, for instance, there should be someone capable of browsing data of the same right on the spot and then send it either as text or email to that very resident. 
 
Stride only bought the mandate to become an MP when he was 48 years of age. As with all the other leadership candidates he derives from practice experience having started an exhibitions and publishing business. He also established a subsidiary in the US where he spent quite some time and he has recently sold the Venture Marketing Group in UK where he and his wife Michelle, who is also the mother of their triplets, have majority stake. 
 
I say what may that mean he is rich, and if that is or is not an issue in today’s politics. 
 
He says: ‘What the Conservatives have to do is always back aspiration, opportunity and achievement. ’ It was a time when we were excellent in those so that is something that has to be made to shine more. I have never had anything handed to me in life and all that I have in life today was created by me and for that I am proud. I want more people to do it and I want more a society to be like that and me to be part of that 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 I considered to be the most important as it relate to my ability to be an effective leader in any organization. He has a conviction that the secret to regaining the Tories into power will not just lie in leadership alone ESOP, he posits that creating something out of nothing, as well as handling the largest spending department in Government with ninety thousand employees, and a budget of £280 billion a year makes him the best candidate for the job. 
 
Two people he looked up to most were Kennedy John F who challenged people to go for space race rightly said that one should do things not because they are easy but because they are difficult and Field Marshal William Slim who commanded the Fourteenth Army also known as the “Forgotten Army” in the Burma campaign who fought in the Second World War. 
 
Slim, later – created viscount, took over an utterly defeated army which was chased out of Burma by the Japanese and rested in India only to be pushed by it into a defensive action to secure India against Japanese invasion and subsequently to retake Burma. 
 
Recalls Stride sentimental over Slim, he had the kind of leadership style by “encouraging everyone to aim higher, make every person improve on the self, was all about confidence building, empowering people and regards their perspectives But after the decision and the direction is set, then the focus was on going for it”. 
 
Slim wrote his emotional memoir, which was named ‘Defeat Into Victory’ Stride firmly believes with the right leader the Tories can change their luck before the next general election. “Yet, the reality is that Labour’s position is far more tentative than its poll numbers suggest,” he says, noting that, Starmer assumed leadership with a mere 34% of the popular vote, which is historically low, the lowest in a winning party since 1918. 
 
“Politics is unpredictable, but I agree with Keith Joseph that many things that occupy liberals or conservatives, simply lie in the middle. 
 
“We should be demanding a cut in taxes, we must engage in controlling net migration, we must come up with a convincing strategy of addressing issues on the illegals in the United States. ” 

On that account is he the least radical of the six contenders for the prize? 
 
“I think, I might be more attractive to the broader electoral college,” he says, when questioning whether Tory members will opt for a leader who has wider appeal or the most extreme candidate for the last two. “It’s not about which hue of blue you are,” he insists, adding that: “There may be temptation to engage in activities that would directly suit a certain number of blind member attractions or rewards without considering the impacts on being able to come up with a united, strong party. ” 
 
One of those things, he says, is the European Convention on Human Rights. Acceptance or rejection of the idea to leave the ECHR has became a sort of an indicator of a candidate’s right-wing orientation, however, Stride found it reasonable to expect that such a decision should be made collectively, for the party .

“We are aware that a segment of the membership are very worried about the ECHR,” he noted, “and I understand why that feeling is prominent, There are opinions ranging on the matter throughout our parliamentary party and the first thing a leader is supposed to do is to build consensus of the party, Hence it would be rational to me to go along with the settled view of the party though the parliamentary party by engaging in a process that will arrive at 
 
This sounds a lot like Rishi Sunak’s position on the ECHR, which may ironically not be a surprise given that Stride ran his leadership campaign But he bristles at the idea that he is the “continuity Rishi” candidate. In that case, without defining the five pledges Sunak made, which were: halting the boats and reducing the NHS waiting list, Stride suggests “The way that we set up some of our metrics for success means that there was necessarily an error involved. ” 
 
When after such a dreadful defeat in the election one of the first names which comes to mind in Tory circles is that of Lord Houchen who actually won his seat in Tees Valley Mayoral contest in May. 
 
 
Stride would see him in his shadow cabinet if he became the leader offering insights in areas such as the decentralization of power to the regional governments. “We have made a great success of devolution and we can go even further,” he says, and mentions former West Midlands mayor Andy Street, who lost the position to Labour’s Richard Parker after serving seven years in office. 
 
“I want to take what Ben has done, see how much further we can actually push it, and what Andy did in his time,” Stride says; He wants to give more power to metro mayors and allow them to decide being money to their budgets without restrictions. Houchen created the first mayoral development corporation beyond London to build 20 000 tasks in and around the deep water Teesport and regained the loss-making Teesside Airport into public ownership that made him well-known as an effective executive. 
 
If Stride does not win the leadership he won’t be short of hobbies to keep him occupied in his spare time. He has scuba diver PADI and is also a qualified tour guide of the British Museum though personally he feels that Elgin Marbles belong in Britain. 
 
Of course, flying cannot be rejected as one of the most amazing things people can do for themselves in terms of improving their quality of life. Stride earned his pilot license during his stint in the US in the 1990s, and says that there “is no greater buzz” that flying solo for the first time. 
 
There is one final question I pose to him about the extraordinary photographs of a light aircraft that crash landed on the A419 in Gloucestershire early this week, and he brightens up as he shows me how in making a forced landing on a public through fare- one always has to ensure that one is heading in the direction that the traffic is fowing. 
 
He also tells me how to get out of a tailspin if you lose power and find yourself corkscrewing vertically towards the ground: they forcefully use the rudder flap to counter spin and then back on the yoke to transition from a dive. 
 
On the face of it, it cannot be described as an admirable trait of a potential leader corresponding to the position of a Conservative MP, but if the latter is looking for calmness in a crisis, it is high time to recall Mel Stride.