Tory Chair Faces Calls To Resign Over "Arrogant" Chicken Run

There is an old animal parable of the scorpion and the frog. A scorpion asks a frog to carry it over the river.

The frog is worried about being stung, but the scorpion reassures the frog that there is no reason it would sting it, because if the frog died it would drown too. Halfway through crossing the river, however, the scorpion stings the frog. As they both meet a watery end, the frog asks the scorpion why it did it. “It’s in my nature,” the scorpion replies.

One Tory advisor – between expletives – tells PoliticsHome that he believes Richard Holden behaves exactly like the scorpion in this fable.

The Chairman of the Conservative Party has become a figure of ire amongst former MPs, fellow candidates, activists and volunteers over his parachute landing as the candidate – from a shortlist of one – for the 20,412-strong majority constituency of Basildon and Billericay.

“I’m quite appalled by his scrabbling for a safe seat,” one cabinet minister tells PoliticsHome, “he is a man without substance and now he looks terrible”. “It is an astonishing lack of political and human judgement,” a former party chairman adds. “He is an absolute disgrace,” an outgoing MP says.

Holden had been the MP for North West Durham since 2019, elected with a 1,144 majority. The seat was abolished by boundary changes, with parts of the constituency subsumed by neighbouring seats like City of Durham and North Durham, as well as a number of wards going to Bishop Auckland, where in November the outgoing MP Dehenna Davison announced she was standing down.

PoliticsHome understands that Holden would have been offered exclusivity by the candidates committee to go for the Bishop Auckland vacancy, seeing as his constituency had been abolished and it was the