A very British coop

Conservative MPs are migrating this summer from marginals to safe seats. Labour calls it the chicken run.

So now we know. There were, it emerged from yesterday's issue of the Parliamentary Monitor, no fewer than five well-known Tories on the short-list for the selection of the candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Mid-Sussex.

All are sitting MPs. Three are Government ministers.

The names on the short-list - Armed Forces minister Nicholas Soames, Northern Ireland Security minister Sir John Wheeler, Defence Procurement minister James Arbuthnot and two of the party's, shall we say, more colourful backbenchers, Terry "hang em and flog em" Dicks and David "Basildon" Amess - reveal the scale and intensity of the unseemly scramble for seats underway among the members of Britain's ruling party. Labour has dubbed it "the chicken run", claiming that Conservative MPs are deserting "loyal voters" by abandoning their seats and looking for safer ones - and effectively conceding that they think the Tories will lose the next general election.

Of course, there is always a certain amount of shuffling at this point in the life of a parliament, as older or disillusioned MPs announce their intention not to stand at the next general election. But the extent of this year's musical chairs points to the depth of the Conservatives' malaise. Only nine Labour MPs and three Liberal Democrats have said they will step down at the next election, compared with 38 Tory MPs who have decided they have had enough of politics. Commentators predict some two dozen more will join the exodus before the election.

Those who remain are interested only in the safest of seats. When the Holborn and St Pancras constituency party appealed for candidates to take on Labour's Frank Dobson and his majority of 10,000, they had such a poor response they had to re-run the selection procedure. And it is not just the mood of the country that prospective Tories fear. The changes introduced by the Boundary Commission, which reviews the shape of parliamentary constituencies, has increased the number of marginals which Labour looks set to win.

As a result Tories are on the move in numbers reminiscent of migrating starlings.

Nicholas Soames is to leave his Crawley constituency after winning the contest to acquire Mid-Sussex. Stephen Dorrell, the Health Secretary, is to switch from Loughborough to neighbouring Charnwood. Sir George Young, the Transport Secretary, will be on the move from Ealing Acton, possibly to Maidenhead. David Amess is to abandon Basildon for the altogether plumper majority of Southend West. Others, like Norman Lamont, Winston Churchill, Peter Bottomley and James Arbuthnot, are still searching, bound for destinations yet unknown. And there are many more lesser known figures also on the move.

But the most potentially embarrassing refugee is Brian Mawhinney, the party chairman. Labour is readying itself to dub Dr Mawhinney "the Tory party chairman who can't even hold his own marginal".

Dr Mawhinney has a majority of 5,376 in his present seat of Peterborough but that could well be reduced by the boundary changes. The Tory chairman could switch to the newly-formed - and much safer - constituency of North- west Cambridgeshire which will contain some of his existing constituents. "He will not make a decision until both associations are up and running, which will take some time," said a spokesman for Dr Mawhinney's office at the party headquarters, somewhat stiffly. Labour, meanwhile, is sharpening its Chairman Chicken epithets.

None of this is anything to do with fear of defeat, if you talk to the Tories involved. They are developing a string of elegant justifications for the political migration to safer seats. "Nicholas Soames is very much a countryman, and the rural parts of the seat have been removed by the boundary changes. It is only natural that he would prefer a less urban constituency," said a chap from Crawley Conservative Association, touchingly.

"Stephen Dorrell could, we think, stay here and win. It is just that there it will be ... easier," said a constituency officer in Mr Dorrell's old constituency, Loughborough. "I'm getting a bit old to be fighting a marginal," said Peter Bottomley, 51, disarmingly.

Some are more aggressive. David Amess's face is scorched on the nation's memory because at each of the past two general elections Basildon has been the first seat to declare. Amess's broad smile was the first signal of Tory victory.

For a long time it seemed that Amess's chief political purpose was to mention Basildon as much as he could in the House of Commons. He claims he is being driven out by highly personal campaigns against him by both the local Labour Party and the media. "I was a very young man when I was elected. Now I have a wife and five children. I wouldn't want to put my family through the pressure of all that again. It'll be even worse in 1997," he said yesterday.

The fact that the same local press covers Basildon (majority 1,480) and Southend West (majority 11,902) seems to escape him. Some local Tories are unimpressed.

One activist described his decision as "outrageous", and said it was well known that in marginal seats an incumbent MP stood a better chance than a new candidate. "If ever there was an incumbency effect it is in Basildon," he said. "His whole raison d'etre as an MP was that he held Basildon," said another. "He is throwing away his personal vote and making it that much harder for his successor."

Mr Amess rejects that and insists that boundary changes have destroyed the integrity of the constituency. "I disapprove very strongly of the changes. It will now cover two local authorities, not just Basildon, and 20,000 people will be lost along with my party headquarters."

The fact is that all over the country the Tories have been outsmarted over boundary changes by Labour. Labour has been much more effective in arguing its case to the Boundary Commissions (there is one for each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) to influence the way constituency boundaries have been redrawn.

When the commissions started work in 1991, the Tories underestimated the impact the changes could have because most political commentators prediected the changes would, as is usual, work to the Tories' advantage. There was very little co-ordination between Tories in different constituencies in the evidence they gave to the Commission. They were hindered because cost cutting led to several Tory agents being made redundant. Indeed a great deal of the evidence submitted by Conservative constituency activists, MPs and councils was contradictory. The Labour Party by contrast ran a highly centralised campaign and threatened disciplinary action against any member who opposed the official submission. The commissions completed their work early this year, presented their report to the Home Office in April and it was approved by the House of Commons in June, setting off the chicken run in earnest.

Labour encouraged the Commission to adopt a strategy of changing the organisation of the shire constituencies. It is this which has hit the Tories.

In the past rural Tory seats formed what were known as "sandwiches" in which county towns were divided into two seats, each with its hinterland of rural wards. This meant the urban Labour vote was split. The rural Tory vote secured the seat even if voters in the town went Labour.

The Commission has now changed tack. To allow for population growth, the Commission this time used the urban centre as the nucleus of the new seats. The outcome is known as a "doughnut", with one urban seat surrounded by several country seats. "Labour's intention was never to try to get new safe Labour seats created," explained one Labour strategist. "We just went for anything that would destabilise the Tory vote. What we tried to do was create as many marginals as we could. And we enlisted the support of local people - playing on rural parish councils who didn't want to be lumped in with a new town. But we were realistic about what the Commission would wear. The strategy was to maximise the number of winnable seats."

Conservative Central Office realised too late what was happening. Its officials are trying to be sanguine. "Which candidate represents which seat is a matter for the constituency associations," said one. But the resulting free market in Tory candidates is not what they would have wanted.

Ordinarily constituencies chose from a mixture of young merchant bankers who have in a previous elections safely carried the Tory flag in a Labour seat and former MPs who have lost their seats in previous elections, with ex-ministers like John Maples, Francis Maude or Michael Fallon high on the lists. Now these traditional candidates are being augmented by carpetbaggers. The term carpetbagger was originally a scornful appellation applied, after the American Civil War, to Northerners who went South and sought election by appealing to the Negro vote. Currying favour with Negroes is not always a high priority in a Conservative adoption meeting: the maverick ex-MP Peter Bruinvels is more likely, according to rivals, to "get out a pair of handcuffs and rage about law and order".

This time the carpetbaggers are sitting MPs like James Arbuthnot, whose existing seat of Wanstead and Woodford is being divided in three parts "like Gaul", as he puts it. Or like the former roads minister and now free-thinking backbencher Peter Bottomley, who has told his Eltham constituency - majority 1,666 - to find a younger man and has cast himself upon the waters. It is, he acknowledges, "an exercise in ritual humiliation" but asks: "Why is politics the only profession where you have to lose before you can move? Does a consultant have to get sacked before he can move to another hospital? To exclude from the selection for a safe seat those who are currently doing a competent job in Parliament seems pretty perverse."

It is an exercise that has been performed in the past by MPs as distinguished as Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Baker and Sir Leon Brittan. But it can come unstuck, as Iain Sproat found when he went for a safer seat in the 1987 election and lost it, only to find that another Tory held the Scottish seat he had abandoned.

That is not the only risk. What chances of swinging the local activists behind Terry Dicks in Hayes and Harlington (majority 53) now they know their MP has spurned them in favour of attempting to get the seat of Mid- Sussex, and then St Ives, only to find himself spurned by them in turn? And the acrimony is growing between the carpetbagging MPs.

David Evennett (Erith and Crayford) beat Cyril Townsend (Bexleyheath) for the merged Bexleyheath and Crayford seat and now, insiders say, Townsend may challenge Sir Edward Heath for the remaining Bexley seat. Sir Paul Beresford, the junior Environment Minister, is said to be upset at losing the new Croydon Central seat to neighbouring Tory MP David Congdon (Croydon NE). Sir Nicholas Scott, the former Minister for the Disabled and MP for Chelsea, who has what the Americans call an ethics problem after a car accident involving a small child, is likely to face challenges in the new Kensington and Chelsea constituency from Norman Lamont and James Arbuthnot. And Alan Duncan (Rutland and Melton) is not on speaking terms with Edward Garnier (Harborough) after discovering Garnier had no respect for the former Tory shibboleth Thous Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbour's Seat.

Some, of course, are playing it all with consummate skill. Stephen Dorrell drew all the local worthies into his decision to move with the result that no feather has been ruffled.

"He has moved to the part which has split off, even though it contains just 28 per cent of the electorate," said Harry Barber, chairman of Loughborough Conservative Association yesterday. "We'd have liked him to stay but we were content to leave the choice to him. We understand why he's moved. He's an asset to the party and the country and he should be in the House of Commons." Such is Dorrell's finesse that another local bigwig went so far as to say: "Quite frankly I would have questioned his judgement if he hadn't gone."