Rob Blackhurst

How did the Young Conservatives Shake Off Their Tory Boy image?

Though the Watford Gap in Northamptonshire is famously the place where the north begins, it has been suggested that a more evocative frontier would be the Cheshire town of Crewe. Here, the foreboding skies, flat vowels and redbrick Victorian hotels are unmistakably the north of the imagination – a place where, traditionally, the Labour vote has been weighed rather than counted.

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Though the Watford Gap in Northamptonshire is famously the place where the north begins, it has been suggested that a more evocative frontier would be the Cheshire town of Crewe. Here, the foreboding skies, flat vowels and redbrick Victorian hotels are unmistakably the north of the imagination – a place where, traditionally, the Labour vote has been weighed rather than counted.

Crewe is virgin terrain for the members of Conservative Future arriving from the home counties with their student railcards, iPhones and Duracell energy levels to campaign in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Born in the late 1980s, they are almost half the age of the "Killers generation", the late-thirty-something metropolitans in David Cameron's circle. They have no memory of Margaret Thatcher and only a hazy recollection of John Major's benighted administration. They were still in primary school in the years when Blair first bestrode politics and the Conservative party was tearing itself apart. Most of their knowledge of the pre-Blair era comes from their politics A-level class. To them, Thatcher and her battles are every bit as mythical and golden as the crusades.

I meet a car-full of them as they arrive at the by-election campaign headquarters in a comically grim location: a car park next to a concrete former British Rail office block, opposite a council estate and in the shadow of Crewe Alexandra football stadium. As they loiter amid old women elaborately folding leaflets and Tory MPs milling around in khaki body-warmers, they look creased after a night of cheap gin and sleeping four-to-a room in the Travelodge.

Leading the delegation is 23-year-old Patrick Sullivan, known as "Puddles" or "Patch" to his friends. Sullivan is studying for a postgraduate degree in marketing. On first impressions he is the young fogey of the group – rotund and crumpled in a Churchillian way, an aficionado of the Prime Minister brand of snuff who was christened "Tory Boy" at university. Like all good Thatcherites, he was inspired by Friedrich Hayek's demolition of socialism The Road to Serfdom. But although he seems like a throwback to the young Torydom of the 1980s, Sullivan is a true Cameronite. "The party has ditched a lot of the social conservatism," he says. "We are not really Daily Mail Tories. If you take on a girl out on a date, you don't spend the whole time slagging the date off. You are not going to get a second date. We are now trying to be nice to our dates."

For Sullivan's generation of students, conservatism is now popular. And Conservative Future, as the Young Conservatives became when they were rebranded by William Hague, has become the biggest student political organisation in Britain, with nearly 16,000 members. During the London mayoral election, Conservative Future had enough volunteers to man Boris Johnson's events and enough left over to heckle Ken Livingstone wherever he went. Labour struggled to find enough people to go canvassing. So who are this generation of new Conservatives? And why are members of a famously apolitical generation choosing to devote their weekends to the drudgery of local politics?

As we pick over curled by-election sandwiches and sip stewed tea, conversation turns to the history of Conservative Future. The group responds with an expression of sweet bemusement when we discuss the fact that, just 10 years ago, their Young Conservative predecessors were portrayed as socially maladroit weirdoes – the greasy-haired, prematurely middle-aged stereotype embodied by Harry Enfield's "Tory Boy" character. There are bulging eyeballs when I describe the well-documented antics of the Federation of Conservative Students, shut down by Norman Tebbit in 1986 for sins that included the printing of "Hang Mandela" stickers and calling for a commercial market in the sale of babies.

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Heading down Crewe's narrow streets delivering leaflets, we have to swerve to avoid Jack Straw, purposefully striding out and offering his campaigning handshake to anyone that will take it. As we negotiate stiff gates and aggressive dogs, I talk to the living embodiment of new Conservatives – with a name that Private Eye would kill to have conceived: Anastasia Beaumont-Bott. While everyone else is a recognisable Conservative type – the "gadfly gels" from the countryside, the focused young councillors, the young fogies with parliamentary ambitions, the self-reliant children of the northern working-classes-made-good – it can be safely asserted that, if she had been born 10 years earlier, Beaumont-Bott would not be a member of the Conservative party.

She is 19, bisexual and wears a sharply tailored hounds-tooth overcoat that looks like it has been stolen from a member of the Human League. Her hair is sculpted into a severe pixie-cut, her Scottish skin is deathly pale and she speaks with a genteel Edinburgh Morningside accent. She has, she tells me, 45 pairs of shoes, but today is wearing kitten heels. Her incessantly bleeping personal organiser has been studded (or "pimped") with pink plastic crystals. Beaumont-Bott is chiefly known as the founder of LGBTory (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Tory) – a social network which promotes "pro-gay policies" within the Conservative party. So far, with just 200 members, LGBTory seems not much more than a website with the party's English Oak logo bedecked in the rainbow colours of Gay Pride. But it has been far from idle. LGBTory has held a stall at Gay Pride events throughout Britain – places where resentment still runs deep over the Conservative introduction of Section 28 in schools in the 1980s, forbidding teachers from teaching that homosexual relationships were as valid as heterosexual relationships. "At Pride Scotia we were the only party that bothered to turn up. In the early minutes of setting up, a man walked past us and said: 'Oh – the Conservatives are here. Are we in the right place?' But I'll never forget the moment when a transgender woman came over to us. I was sure we were about to get a lecture. In fact, she came over to tell us that she thought Margaret Thatcher was the best prime minister this country has ever had." And how do the elderly stalwarts of the constituency associations react to the pinking of their party? "They are wary of it. But it's generational. I can't bring myself to break it to the little old ladies sometimes. They've got these big eyes. They force-feed you cake. When they ask what LGBTory is, we tell them that it is a sandwich."

It would seem odd to previous generations of gay campaigners, I say, to join the Conservative party, given its historic opposition to gay equality. "I'll admit that the left championed this. There's no way in hell that some generations – no matter what you say to them – are going to vote Conservative. And I'm perfectly aware that LGBTory only exists because David Cameron is leader."

Beaumont-Bott spent her first years on a council estate in Scotland. I ask about her first political stirrings. "I remember Thatcher," she says adamantly – even though she would have been safely in her cot when the prime minister defenestrated in 1990. Her father, a nightclub promoter, was a "Thatcherite, but not a Conservative". At school, she didn't fit in, "foolishly coming out" when she was 13, as well as coping with dyslexia and dyscalculacy. It's not hard to see how, in this atmosphere of stifling conformity, she was attracted by the right: "Kids can be cruel. I was really badly bullied. The only people who could ever do anything were the police. All of the people that have ever bullied me have been from broken homes. I think that's made me realise why there needs to be a focus on family and community … that's why I'm a Conservative," she laughs. "I had a really crappy time at high school."

Beaumont-Bott has also founded the Conservative Future Social Action Network – which takes its inspiration from the sugary compassionate Conservatism pioneered by Cameron. To demonstrate their belief in the limits of big-state solutions, Conservatives have been ordered out into the community to do good deeds, from selling poppies and volunteering in homelessness shelters to building a pen for some homeless Bagot goats at a children's farm in Gateshead.

A month later I join the Social Action Network for its first meeting, in a pub opposite the Old Bailey. A group of eight has met after work to discuss plans for a makeover of a council estate in Birmingham. "There will be gardens for pensioners and swings for children. But it won't just be doing the flowerbeds," says Beaumont-Bott. "There will be parenting classes, mother-and-toddler classes." In the ideas slot at the end of the meeting, a "cheeky Conservative future calendar for Christmas" is discussed, along with a potential charity record featuring Conservative Future singing "Do They Know It's Christmas?".

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In the first few minutes of meeting Liza Chantelle, it seems like I've stumbled across the Conservative party's Paris Hilton. She has cherry-red false nails, striking extended eyelashes and describes everyone, including David Cameron, as "hot". The best thing, she says, about Conservatives is the canapes. On her Facebook home page she says that Jesus is her "home-boy". Everything she says seems layered in irony: "I've got a very sardonic humour," Chantelle concedes. "I'm very intelligent. Sometimes you find yourself disguising that because it is just easier." The 23-year-old Miss Jamaica runner-up from Harrow is now the face of the Conservatives' latest leaflet. It features her in a tight T-shirt under the slogan "Your Country Needs You". The photo wouldn't look out of place in FHM magazine. She gives me a copy and admits: "They did ask if I had anything less tight."

A working-class Catholic, Chantelle is employed as an event organiser for Arsenal FC and as an assistant to a Euro MP. She thinks that her upbringing, although Labour-voting, was based on Conservative values: "The black community are hard-working and want the best for themselves. My mum got me into a state Catholic school rather than to the local comprehensive. Because Mum had to find money [for travel], it felt like I was going to a private school."

Chantelle was propelled into Conservative politics when David Cameron came to visit a youth centre where she volunteered. She was delegated to show him around: "At first, I said: 'Do I have to? I'm a Labour girl.' " During the visit they discussed politics: "I said, 'I agree with some of your policies, I don't agree with them all.' " Weeks later, she was invited to address the Conservative party conference on young people without qualifications. (The speech, "Help the Hoodies – Don't Put Them Down", is on YouTube.)

I ask whether she was worried that the invitation to the conference was more about improving the party's image than listening to her views on youth crime. "People see the fire in me. If it was ticking boxes, you don't last long in the Tories," she says. And, with some people, she can't win. "People say that there are not enough black people in the Conservatives. And then you join and they still have a go."

Chantelle says that doors have been "held open" for her in the party. Eventually she wants to become an MP, but first she wants to train as a magistrate. She thinks she will have a better understanding of the lives of young black men appearing in court than the middle classes who haven't grown up among them. "There are not enough people of colour who can understand what a young person goes through." But it is striking a blow for young black people in politics that matters most to her – even if they support the Labour party: "I'm not doing the 'big I am'," she says. "If I wanted to be the 'big I am', I'd have my kit off. Simple as."

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I had been warned before that the Exeter Conservatives Masque Summer Ball would be "old school". Given the university's public-school reputation and location in rural Devon, I was curious to see how far the metropolitan creed of Cameronism had spread. After securing an invite from social secretary Tarasyn Whitehead-Patey, I find myself in a hotel on the Georgian seafront in Exmouth, along with around 70 young Conservatives. Before the rubber chicken arrives, the young politicos are swapping customised business cards. People are described as "good fellows". Prayers are said before supper, and there is a toast to Her Majesty as well as a spontaneous verse of "God Save the Queen". Conversation turns to their recent victory over Labour students at paint-balling and the Andy Warhol-style posters of Boris Johnson that have become a halls-of-residence craze. The sight of the ambitious young dreaming of a life in the clergy, army or parliament – traditional estates of the realm – give proceedings a timeless air. Aside from the Bacardi Breezers, we could be at a Conservative gathering at any point in the last century.

What is different is the hunger for victory. The Cameronite apprentices are engaging – with the slight big-fish-in-a-small tank pomposity of student politics: "It is about capitalising on the mood of change that this country wants," says James Morton, Conservative Future chair for Devon and Cornwall: "This was a public schoolboys' drinking club before. [The attitude was], let's raise money and piss it up. Now we are giving something back to politicians."

Morton introduces the main speaker, Michael Rock, a 29-year-old systems consultant who is chairman of Conservative Future. Rock is more raddled and receding than the fresh faces around him. He's business oriented and grew up in the industrial Midlands rather than the bucolic west country. Unlike the received pronunciation ricocheting around the ballroom, he speaks with an East Midlands accent.

Rock tells me afterwards that he is not from traditional Conservative Future stock: "I'm exactly the kind of person who votes for us but isn't a member of the party. I worked for a few years and didn't go to university until I was 25. I don't fit the stereotype at all." I ask him to describe the average member of Conservative Future: "The average member is probably a graduate professional, aged 25, anti-EU, pretty much libertarian. But there has been a reversion back to a community feel where they do believe in social action." But, though he's anti-tribal, Rock's views are far more libertarian than the next Conservative manifesto is likely to be. He believes that income tax should be replaced by a local sales tax, dislikes the fact that the government takes 40p in every pound of income, hates ID cards and distrusts what he sees as fear-mongering by the state: "I don't believe in rule by fear – and that is what Labour have done. It's just like Bush – this sense that we are under attack every single day."

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The Independent newspaper asked recently whether Cameron had made it "cool to be a Conservative" again. On the evidence of my travels, the "decontamination of the Tory brand" is working. It's hard to imagine fashionable young women and openly gay teenagers knocking on doors for the party a decade ago. And, having seen their party in opposition for 10 years, there is not yet a hint of hubris about them – or of the harsh slogans that the Young Conservatives seemed to relish in the 1980s. Most of the new members I met were concerned with a Cameronite agenda of ending family breakdown and generational poverty and safeguarding civil liberties. It's impossible to imagine them using the word "sound", as their 1980s equivalents did, to describe eye-watering views on everything from the repatriation of immigrants to the return of the gallows.

For many of those I met, Labour is the unprincipled and grey establishment party. This could be cyclical – the young are often against the conventional order of things, a trend noticeable among voters in the London mayoral elections. Stephan Shakespeare, chief innovations officer at YouGov, conducted polls for the Evening Standard: "The people who most supported Boris were the older and younger voters – not those in the middle-aged 35 to 55." Among voters under 34, he says: "The further you get from remembering the last Tory government, the more likely you are to vote Conservative."

It is easy to overstate the party's reinvention. These young Tories are far from representative of modern Britain. Their social networking pages show pictures of an England of Pimm's, polo and county shows: a reflection of the Etonian coup at the top of the Conservative party. Many of the members of Conservative Future I met are the children of a narrow seam of the upper-middle classes, for whom being a Conservative is as much a social identity as it is an ideological position. But for the moment, the polls suggest that the electorate don't seem to care. The bad news for Gordon Brown is that these children of Thatcher can't remember when their party last won power. But they can smell victory – and they want it very badly.