Britain sees rise in aspiring political careerists

LONDON - More than a quarter of the candidates chosen by Britain's political parties to fight next year's general election have no experience of any career other than politics.

A survey of 782 prospective parliamentary candidates - 94 per cent of those selected so far, excluding sitting MPs - shows that a greater than ever number are political professionals who have gone from university into a political job as an adviser or researcher.

One in three Conservative candidates are employed full-time as party functionaries or MPs' advisers, despite leader David Cameron's efforts to recruit more MPs with real-life experience.

In May, Cameron announced that he was making the Conservatives' candidates list open even to those who were not paid-up party members, in the hope that fewer "robots" would be elected to Parliament.

The one cheering piece of news for Cameron in the survey, compiled by the New Local Government Network think-tank, is that 46 per cent of Conservative candidates have a business background compared to just 18 per cent of Labour candidates.

The research shows that almost a third of the next batch of Conservatives and more than a quarter of Labour candidates have taken similar paths.

On the Tory side, 18 per cent work for the party and another 12 per cent are working for MPs. The figures for Labour are 14 per cent and 12 per cent.

The full-time professional politician is a relatively new phenomenon in British life.

In 1950, an Oxford academic named Herbert Nicholas carried out a survey of the professional backgrounds of the Conservative and Labour candidates.

He found only an "irreducible minimum" of 30 out of more than 1200 "whose entire life had been so soaked in politics that no other label would have meaning for them," including Winston Churchill and Herbert Morrison, grandfather of the current Business Secretary, Lord Peter Mandelson.

They were easily outnumbered by 37 coal miners running for Labour, or 39 Conservative candidates whose inherited wealth meant that they had not had to work at all.

PATHWAYS TO POWER

Who: David Cameron
Job: Leader of the Opposition
Route: Went straight from university into a job at the Conservative Research Department. Has held only one job outside politics, with Carlton Television.

Who: David Miliband
Job: Foreign Secretary
Route: Joined the Labour think-tank, IPPR, at 24. From there he went to former PM Tony Blair's private office before entering Parliament.

- INDEPENDENT