As the party prepares to select a new leader at a time of national crisis, its membership’s attitudes have hardened

If they love their party, Conservative members have an unusual way of showing it. According to a survey by YouGov, 54% of party members say they would rather see their own party destroyed than have Brexit not take place. Sixty-one per cent would prefer to see “significant damage to the UK economy” and 63% would consider Scotland leaving the United Kingdom to be a price worth paying.

As they prepare to select the next prime minister at a time of crisis, the attitudes of this group are arguably more consequential for the rest of the country than ever before. And the makeup of the membership appears to be changing – and becoming ever more supportive of a hard Brexit.

The extraordinary hardening of attitudes looks to have coincided with the party’s membership increasing by 36,000 to 160,000 in the year to May 2019, raising questions about whether the ranks have been swelled by entryists with more hardline views.

In an article for the Telegraph, Brandon Lewis, the Tory party chairman, attributed the increase to better membership retention, and his account is backed up by Robert Semple, a former chair of the national convention, who oversaw the recent centralisation of the party’s membership processes.

“When I went on to the board you had 636 autonomous associations,” Semple said. “Quite understandably, in many parts of the country they struggled to maintain and retain their membership purely from an administrative point of view.”

Semple is proud of the reforms and dismisses the suggestion that entryism has played any role in the increase in numbers. “I have seen no evidence whatsoever – ever – of any entryism into the Conservative party,” he said. “It’s a myth.”

In a recent poll of members’ attitudes, 44.5% of those questioned said they had joined after the 2016 EU referendum.

“It does seem high, doesn’t it?” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University. “But you have to remember that it looks as if there has been a surge into the party in recent months, and perhaps really since the referendum itself.”

Party memberships waxed and waned, he said, although “it’s not altogether surprising given how important Brexit is to many people, and given how many Ukip members may have been former Conservative members who then came home.”

Mohammed Amin, the chair of the Conservative Muslim Forum, who has called Boris Johnson a “buffoon” and threatened to leave the party if he becomes leader, agreed that members had probably returned.

“Starting in 2005 when David Cameron became party leader, there was a very clear, determined attempt from the top to change the way that the Conservative party was seen by the population at large,” Amin said. “His most notable and most successful measure in this broad area was the introduction of equal civil marriage. That resulted in an exodus of quite a meaningful number of Conservative party members, who found those changes to be unacceptable.

“It’s quite clear that the general tenor of the 2017 general election campaign was to attract former Ukip voters in northern seats, and to some extent it was successful.”

Data from an upcoming book, Footsoldiers, by Bale and his colleagues Paul Webb and Monica Poletti, suggests that even as of two years ago the party was far from representative of the wider population. Men made up 71% of party members, and 54% of members lived in London or the south of England. The stereotype of an octogenarian membership is largely unfounded, with an average age of 57 compared with 53 for Labour.

On economic issues, the membership are substantially further to the right than other parties. Only 14% think government should redistribute income from the better off to the worse off, and only 25% think ordinary working people do not get their fair share. One in five think austerity has gone too far, up from 4% in 2015.

There is a similar story in attitudes to social issues. Up to 77% of members think young people do not have enough respect for traditional British values, and more than half support reintroducing the death penalty. Up to 42% think censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards.

There is some evidence that the Conservative membership is less engaged than members of other parties. Up to 29% think they are ignored by the leadership, compared with 18% of Labour members and 11% of Liberal Democrats, according to the research.

This appears to have translated to levels of activism around the 2017 election. Members reported carrying out an average of 1.7 campaign activities, compared with 2.5 for Labour. Tory members are less likely to have displayed a poster, donated money, attended a public meeting or engaged with a campaign on social media than members of the other parties.

However, Bale believes the survey data also shows a shift towards the extreme on members’ attitudes towards Brexit. “When we asked Conservative party members just after the 2015 election, two-thirds of them exactly told us that they would make up their minds about how to vote in the referendum after seeing what David Cameron came home with following his renegotiation,” he said. “Now we’ve got to a situation where two-thirds of them want a no-deal Brexit.”

• This article was amended on 24 June 2019 because an earlier version referred to a supposed “geriatric membership”. Geriatric refers to a branch of medicine; octogenarian was meant. This has been corrected.