The Spectator combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of Unrivaled Authority.

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online

and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher absolutely free.

Go to spectator.co.uk slash summer.

Hello and welcome to the Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.

I'm Cindy you and today I'm joined by James Hill and Fraser Nelson.

Now James you've been taking a look at the Tory selections that are still ongoing for the next

election and you notice an interesting trend which is that actually the Tories are not really

so much talking about how they're the conservative party on their eat leaflets.

I mean tell us about that.

Yes so this is something to do with I think part of a wider trend which is that when the Tories

are doing badly in the polls they tend to drop the whole Tory thing all together and really just

for the market themselves either on a sort of prime ministerial level the Tories are pretty ruthless

when it comes to leaders they have usually quite a sort of good election winner as their leader

and then also emphasizing local issues and really this is a sort of big story about all of this

is that I think that a lot of the Tories have really tried to in the last couple of years

market themselves as kind of local campaigners and that's why you see that you know in current

selections almost two thirds are local councillors or former local councillors and you're more

likely to get council leaders than special advisors being selected these days with a couple of

exceptions and since writing this piece which published on Thursday morning I've been struck by

about a dozen messages also from people on the list who've gone in touch with me by all sorts of

ways and just said that it really ran true and I think people who had been selected or were

...