Talk of the race to be the next Conservative leader “kicking off” has been going on for about a year now. If you find that hard to believe, cast your mind back to September 2023 when then-hopeful Suella Braverman made her first big pitch for the leadership by freelancing on international law and immigration policy with a speech at a right-wing US think tank. How times have changed – Braverman never even made it into the race, and is currently rumoured to be flirting with defecting to Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
So you would be forgiven for groaning slightly when Tom Tugendhat joked at his official campaign launch yesterday (3 September) that, “One of the things I’ve loved about this leadership contest is you find out who’s been listening.” The highs, lows, gambits, gaffes and personal feuds of the six contenders are so dizzyingly Byzantine in their complexity and long in the making (Tugendhat was referring to a paper he wrote for a think tank in 2013) that even the most obsessive Westminster-watchers get fatigued trying to keep it all straight.
The key point is that the “beginning of the end”, to bastardise Churchill, starts today, when Conservative MPs will have their first chance to whittle down the candidates list into something they hope will have a happier ending than the Sunak vs Truss grudge match of 2022. Fighting it out along with Tugendhat are, of course, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel and Mel Stride. Of these, Stride, who is seen very much as Sunak’s man, is widely expected to fall first. But after that it’s anyone’s guess who makes it to the final four and will get to display their wares in the “beauty pageant” at the Conservative Party Conference in just under a month’s time. Then those four will be voted down to two, who will face the Tory membership in a run-off, announced just ahead of the US election in November.
The endeavours of the candidates during the relative quiet over the summer has reflected their pitches. Patel’s slogan is “Unite to win”: she is deeply grounded in the wider Conservative Party ecosystem and popular with grassroots organisations, and has spent August dashing up and down the country to meet as many local associations and members as possible. She has made overhauling the party apparatus and giving more power to members a key part of her offering.
Jenrick appears to be borrowing lessons from the far glitzier world of US politics, with slick campaign videos and speeches about Britain’s greatness framed in front of fans holding signs bearing his name. Supporters at his launch wore “We Want Bobby J” baseball caps (yes, really). We’ve come a long way from “Robert Generic”.
Cleverly had homemade cupcakes at his, baked by a supporter’s wife, which epitomises the general goodwill towards him within the party. His offering, however, is an uneasy balance, attempting to draw on his experience in government as both foreign secretary and home secretary without tarnishing his record with the failures of Rishi Sunak. Bizarrely, he chose to go big on the Rwanda scheme – a policy which he is widely reported (without his denial) to have branded “batshit”.
Tugendhat, whose launch included M&Ms stamped with his face and giant foam fingers, has the opposite challenge, in that his role as Sunak’s security minister meant he was on the airwaves hammering Labour a lot less than his rivals. His way around this is to turn a weakness into a strength and play up his military background: “I served in silence, my job was to keep the King’s secrets.” (Echoes of Rory Stewart, perhaps?)
Badenoch, meanwhile, has been the clear frontrunner for months – and she knows it. Her leadership slogan doesn’t even feature her name: it is simply “Renewal 2030”. (The next election has to be held by the end of 2029, but no matter.) She eschewed a summer of hustings and went away on holiday, no doubt confident enough in her ability to at least make it to Conference. In her campaign video she declares she is “not afraid of Doctor Who” – a reference to her spat with the actor David Tennant over trans rights and single-sex spaces. Her convictions on this issue are sure to fire up the Tory faithful, but it doesn’t do much to allay fears from her critics that she is more interested in having a fight than bringing people together. She is, as one supporter of hers put it to me in January, “not the sort of person to go into the Commons tea rooms and charm people” – her strengths lie elsewhere. But charming people, first in the Commons tea rooms and then in local Conservative associations across the country, is how one becomes Tory leader. And becoming prime minister requires charming the electorate.
So far, the polls strongly suggest Badenoch still leads against all of her rivals. But that comes with the caveat that it is notoriously difficult to poll Conservative members – there isn’t even any publicly available data on how many, let alone who, they are.
Since we can’t gaze into the crystal ball, it is more interesting, perhaps, to look more widely at public sentiment regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the contenders. Luke Tryl at More in Common has done some fascinating analysis of focus groups, mostly with people who voted Tory in 2019 but abandoned the party in 2024. When it comes to why the Tories lost, the key themes that emerge are lack of trust, lack of relatability to ordinary people, and incompetence. In focus groups, Badenoch is seen as honest and refreshing (not just any politician would go to war with Doctor Who), but lacking in experience. Cleverly scores highly for relatability but low for seriousness. Jenrick has substance, but not likeability. Patel is seen as strong but divisive (despite her campaign slogan). And Tugendhat comes out as the most prime ministerial and able to address the competence issue, but is deemed posh by the public. (Stride – whose strength is that he is “new” and weakness is that he is “unexciting”, might make a good shadow chancellor.)
Party members may disagree. But before they get their say, it’s the turn of MPs. The nature of the contest, with parliamentary support switching from one candidate to another as people are eliminated, also makes it impossible to predict who makes it to the final two, especially as there are only 121 Tory MPs in total, less than half of whom have so far declared for one contender or another. At a hustings event in parliament yesterday (the last before voting begins), the mood suggested that there was still everything to play for. Much applause and banging of desks could be heard from outside. There were repeated questions from attendees on the candidates’ stance on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), suggesting that the minds of some MPs are more focused on refighting internal party battles than on tackling the issues raised by voters in Luke Tryl’s focus groups.
Still, we are now well and truly off, and by this evening six will have become five. Have MPs been listening to what the electorate told them on 4 July? We shall see.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Rachel Reeves’s critics are in denial]
Content from our partners
Related
