Representative government in the land of the Mother of Parliaments

The 0.3% of U.K. Voters Who Will Pick the Next Prime Minister

Some 160,000 members of the Conservative Party will make the choice.

This sliver of the population, just 0.3 percent of registered voters, is mostly white, aging and male. And it is poised to use its new clout — the party’s grass roots have never before picked a prime minister — to catapult Boris Johnson into Downing Street, potentially cleaving the world’s oldest and most successful political party as it sends Britain on the path to what could be a tumultuous Brexit.

As the Brexit mess has unfolded, Conservatives have grown ever more impatient, ever more fixated on leaving the European Union, come what may. 

Most members said in recent polling by YouGovthat leaving the bloc was worth enduring significant damage to the economy, secession by Scotland and Northern Ireland and even a shattering of the Conservative Party itself.

. . . .

Conservative membership has plunged since the 1950s, leaving behind a small core of politically active and increasingly right-wing supporters. 

Once effectively a social club where the upper classes mingled with their representatives and perhaps met a spouse, the party has remade itself as class-based politics fragmented and voters realigned themselves by education levels and age.

. . . .

One of the great concerns among Conservatives is the rise of the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage, the former leader of the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party. 

The Brexit Party crushed the Conservatives in the European elections last month with its message of Brexit at any cost. 

Mr. Johnson is seen as far and away the best equipped to blunt that charge.

. . . .

A no-deal Brexit, seen as the salvation of the party by some members, looks to others like its ruin. 

Economists warn it could drive up food prices, cost jobs, choke off the supply of medicines and badly disrupt British industry.

“It scares my mum, and I don’t want anything that scares my mum,” Jo Bartley, 49, a Conservative in Canterbury, said. 

“I think as a party, we should avoid things that scare people.”

Ms. Bartley is in the minority, with two-thirds of members preferring a no-deal Brexit.

Roughly 40 percent of the party’s members are older than 65, according to research led by Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, whose coming book on the members is called “Footsoldiers.” 

And they are disproportionately wealthy.