Anyone For The Conservative Home Party?

Tim Montgomerie, founder and editor of Conservative Home has done an astounding job in building the incredibly successful Conservative Home website since he started it in 2005.

Tim's latest innovation is Conservative Home Gold - A premium subscription service which for £49 per year gets you a quarterly magazine, a ticket to the annual lecture (speaker George Osborne), an invite to the Conservative Home Briefing event - 'what's going on inside the Conservative party', a calendar (er ok) and access to an on-line 'debate club' (definitely one to watch).

In other words Tim is doing EXACTLY what the Conservative party should have done years ago to revitalise the membership and monetise Conservative activism.

Incidentally, as it happens I suggested to Iain Dale about 6 months ago that he did a similar thing - i.e. offered a premium service to his blog readers for a modest sum - he rejected it as the mad ramblings of a loony..no hard feelings Iain.

I now find myself deliberating over where to spend my cash.. My Conservative membership fees must be due soon but why bother? I am not sure I really get anything for my money but the Conservative Home Gold thing gives me some really tangible benefits for a reasonable price.

He is a clever fella that Tim Montgomerie.

I am mindful of the fact that:

1) Tim became Iain Duncan Smith's chief of staff just 2 months before IDS lost the leadership - so I guess he got a tantalising taste of what it was like to be the main mover and shaker behind the scenes before it was cruelly snatched away. I guess leaving him wanting more.

2) Tim has long predicted that someone will one day utilise the power of the Internet to take the political world by storm and start a new political movement.

Sounds very like a self-fulfilling prophecy in the making to me.

Good luck to him. I hope the Conservative leadership have really understood that the power of Conservative support is ever increasingly lined up in force, not behind the Conservative Party, but behind Conservative Home.

I am looking forward to meeting Tim Montgomerie on November 7th. He has agreed to speak at an event I am organising (Curzon Supper Club - event details and tickets available here).

It took a bit of persuading to get him to attend but he finally agreed. It was a great relief. I really wanted to secure a speaker who will be an absolutely key player in the future of UK politics. If he hadn't have agreed I would have had to have 'fallen-back' to a second choice like... er David Cameron perhaps ;-)