The Conservatives’ problem with young members started way before Ben Bradley

When Ben Bradley was appointed as the Tory vice-chair for youth in Theresa May’s reshuffle, he told me that one of the biggest challenges he faced was making sure the public didn’t think the Tories hated poor people. So, it’s rather unfortunate that this week the MP for Mansfield provided fuel for that assertion.

In a blog post he wrote five years ago, Bradley suggested that benefit claimants should have vasectomies rather than take money off the state in the form of multiple child benefits. In defending Iain Duncan Smith’s benefit cap, he hit out at what he called a “vast sea of unemployed wasters”. Since then, more dubious comments have emerged of Bradley claiming public sector workers are “lost in their own fantasy land” and should quit if they are unhappy about their pay, and writing during the London riots that: “For once I think police brutality should be encouraged.”

It’s a terrible start to the Tories’ new drive to detoxify and endear themselves to younger voters – or any voters below the age of 44, for that matter. Support for the Conservatives is just 27% among those aged 18-34 – the lowest approval levels on record. As for values, an Opinium poll found that among this group, only 15% of voters now say that the Tory party represents “people like me”. Comments such as those from senior figures like Bradley mean that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. But the biggest issue is that to many voters, the latest incident won’t be all that surprising.

When it comes to young Tories, there’s a troubling history of them making offensive comments or being wilfully blind to how they sound to anyone outside of their clique. The last official Conservative youth organisation – Conservative Future – was shut down in 2015 amid links to a bullying scandal and the suicide of a young activist, Elliott Johnson. Its predecessor, Young Conservatives, was axed by William Hague in 1998 after its members generated too much negative press with extreme rightwing views and debauched behaviour. The Federation of Conservative Students, meanwhile, was broken up by Norman Tebbit in 1986 because of the embarrassing antics of its members.

Since 2015, there’s been no official group – something which hurt the Tories in the snap election as it blunted their ground game even further – but still the negative headlines have continued. There was the non-official (and now defunct) Activate, which was as cringeworthy as it was offensive, and then reports last year of a student at the Cambridge University Conservative Association “laughing about burning £20 note in front of homeless man”.

Put all this together and you’d be forgiven for wondering whether the brains at CCHQ were foolish for passing up an offer from I’m a Celebrity winner Georgia “Toff” Toffolo on the grounds that she was “too posh”. Posh or not, having won the most popular popularity contest on television, she is seen by many millions to be a decent person – not a phrase associated with many young Conservatives in the popular consciousness.

But even if they’d jumped at the offer, betting on one individual to turn things around for the party is a mistake in itself. There is no silver bullet for the Conservative youth problem: winning over younger voters will be a slow process that won’t be fixed by a star endorsement or shy Tories with digital tool kits complete with gifs (as suggested this weekend). Instead, people need to feel that the government is giving them a chance to get on in life – and fixing the problems that hit them the hardest, such as the broken housing market.

Perhaps there’s still a role here for Bradley to play. He cannot be put into the category of a toff laughing at the less privileged. A university dropout, Bradley first got interested in politics after he found himself living in a bedsit in a dead-end job and wondering how he could improve things. “I was a landscape gardener in my little bedsit and I just thought, ‘How do I get out of this?’” That’s something many people can relate to.

We say we want more human politicians, but in the digital age there is a new generation of politicians – including Labour’s Jared O’Mara and the SNP’s Mhairi Black – who grew up online. The naive and ill-judged comments that were once said in a pub and forgotten are now preserved online forever if someone is prepared to look hard enough for them.

Bradley has apologised for his comments – saying he has matured since writing them. It was always going to be a perilous task trying to bring young supporters into the tent. Perhaps Bradley is now best-placed to make sure tomorrow’s Conservative politicians don’t make the same mistakes he did.

• Katy Balls is The Spectator’s political correspondent