Young Tories on campus in Leeds

It’s been said that if you’re not a liberal when you’re 25 you don’t have a heart, and if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35 you don’t have a brain.

This quote is often attributed to Winston Churchill though whether or not it’s true is debatable. What is fair to say is when it comes to nailing their colours to the political mast most university students are of a red rather than blue persuasion.

This has long been the case. When I was a student in Preston (many moons ago) you could count the number of openly Tory-supporting students on the fingers of one hand, and little has changed in the intervening decades. As a rough rule of thumb, students tend to lean towards the left and its inherent idealism and activism.

This was borne out following last year’s snap election when YouGov interviewed over 50,000 British adults to find out how the nation voted. It revealed that among full-time students, 64 per cent voted Labour compared with 19 per cent for the Conservatives and just 10 per cent for the Lib Dems, which some people may find surprising given their staunch anti-Brexit stance.

What this showed unequivocally was that an awful lot of young people have been swept up in Corbynmania and the promise of a better, and certainly radically different, future.

But what about those students with a pragmatic head on their young shoulders?

Lewis Melvin, 20, is a first year chemistry student at the University of Leeds. He comes from a working-class family in Middlesbrough - which is far removed from the stereotypical idea of a brash young Tory from a wealthy background - the old Bullingdon cliché. He stood to be a Conservative councillor in his hometown but wasn’t elected.

“It’s not something I go around advertising and I imagine if I did then I’d potentially get some stick. I’ve got a few friends who are a lot more vocal about being a Conservative than I am and they do get some stick,” he says.

“I’ve got friends who support Labour and we talk about politics and there’s no problem at all, but I think there’s a minority of people on the left who are extremely vocal and as soon as they see you’re a Tory just brand you as racist, xenophobic and homophobic, which is ridiculous.

“The majority of Tories I know hold quite socially liberal views, they’re more economic conservatives. But just saying you’re a Tory gets you tarred with so much these days.”

It’s perhaps not surprising then that some students prefer to keep their political opinions to themselves. “It’s a lot harder to admit you’re a conservative out of fear of getting shouted down,” he says.

Which makes Conservative societies like these all the more important. “At university you’ve got so many people from different backgrounds it’s inevitable you’re going to get exposed to other views and what you need to do is listen to what they have to say instead of shouting them down.”

Seb Baker is president of the Sheffield Hallam Students’ Union Conservative Society. The group had been dormant until he and a friend restarted it last summer. “It did technically exist but no one was part of it so we got it going again.” When he says “we”, he means the 15 members that make up the society. “We’re pretty pleased with that. I know other universities have more but they’ve been going a lot longer.”

Seb, a 20 year-old second year politics student, says they hope to lend a hand in future local elections. In the meantime they meet up regularly to discuss politics and plan future events. Perhaps not surprisingly Brexit - “everybody’s talking about that” - looms large, as do international issues like the situation in Zimbabwe and Donald Trump - “it’s hard not to talk about him.”

Their main objective at the moment is to attract more members, though he’s keen to point out they’re not political nerds. “We’re like any other students – we like to hang out

FACTFILE

While the Labour Party’s membership has surged to more than 500,000 under Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservatives have seen their numbers dwindle in recent years.

The party last published figures in 2013, when it had 149,800 members, but has not published an update since then. Some activists and academics estimate it has fallen to 100,000, or less. Former party chairman Grant Shapps said this week the Conservatives should “come clean” about how many members it has.