Why Tory centrists are hopeless at leadership elections

Conservative MPs try to second-guess the membership rather than voting with conviction.

Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

Politics can be a cruel business.

Imagine how it must feel to be James Cleverly. Last Tuesday afternoon, the leadership of the Conservative Party was within his grasp. The previous week he had an excellent party conference and finished top in the penultimate round of MPs, just short of the number needed to guarantee a place in the final two. With Tom Tugendhat dropping out of the race, Cleverly might reasonably have expected to gain the majority of Tugendhat’s 20 supporters. He was the candidate with momentum, likely to top the vote among MPs, with polls showing him strengthening his position among the party members. He looked close to unstoppable.

Except he wasn’t. Twenty-four hours later, he had been stopped. He finished third and last, with his vote falling from 39 to 37 votes.

With a secret ballot, we may never learn precisely what happened but it is evident some supporters of Cleverly voted for other candidates (in the most part, Robert Jenrick) because they used their vote with the purpose of determining Cleverly’s opponent in the final round.

A shadow cabinet member told me that they knew of two MPs who had admitted doing so. Presumably, for every one MP admitting to such an error, there will be at least one other who is keeping quiet to spare their embarrassment. In other words, we have ended up with a final round of Jenrick vs Kemi Badenoch by accident. No wonder the Tory right (who did not consider Cleverly to be sufficiently sound) and the party’s opponents on the left find the whole matter hilarious.

This is further evidence that the centrists in the Tory parliamentary party are hopeless at leadership elections. In fairness, it is understandable that MPs think about who will appeal to the party membership but the consequence is that, rather than voting for who they think would be the best person to lead the party, they try to second-guess the membership. This results in the One Nation group of MPs splintering, with some even supporting a candidate from the right because they perceive their victory as inevitable and that it is best to be “at the table to retain influence”. (Centrists who backed Boris Johnson in 2019 or Liz Truss in 2022, you know who you are.)

This time round, the failure of centrist MPs to get a candidate into the final two is even more of an avoidable blunder. July’s general election has changed the nature of the parliamentary party, removing the 2019 cohort of Johnsonian Red Wall MPs. Although not all votes get cast on ideological grounds (candidates of the left attract some votes from the right, and vice versa), a leadership race in which Cleverly and Tugendhat received 69 votes and Jenrick and Badenoch received 61 votes (as happened on last week) suggests a fair degree of pragmatism.

Admittedly, Cleverly is hardly a figure of the Tory left (having backed Brexit, Johnson and Truss) but he does not convey an aura of fanaticism or factionalism. Given the alternatives, the Conservative mainstream (at least, what used to be considered the Conservative mainstream) could have lived with him. The public and the party members even seemed to like him.

For at least some MPs, getting Cleverly into the final two was not going to be enough. He not only needed to be in the final two, he needed to be up against the candidate who was least popular with the party members. Again, it is all about second guessing what members think. If the power to choose the leader was reserved for MPs, there would be no call for these games.

So the Tory right has two options from which to choose. The Tory left is wondering who is the least worst option.

Jenrick is a relatively recent convert to the Tory right and some hope he will switch back to the centre ground. I am not so sure. He appears to have been radicalised by his time at the Home Office and it is plausible that he believes that the correct political strategy is to focus on Reform voters by turning the Tories into a single-issue anti-immigration party. A candidate seeking to move on to the centre ground would not appoint Jacob Rees-Mogg as his party chairman. Imagine what the next cohort of Tory parliamentary candidates would look like.

Badenoch is harder to judge. She appears to be very much her own woman who will pursue her own agenda. The difficulty is that beyond her antipathy to identity politics (which does have an appeal beyond the Tory right) and her Truss-like aversion to some institutions, her thinking is not always that advanced. At the party conference, for example, she appeared to float a radical deregulatory agenda – questioning maternity pay and the minimum wage – only to retreat from it. Then there is the question of temperament. Plenty of those who have worked with her doubt that she can hold together a team. A work in progress, perhaps? Maybe, but a former ministerial colleague of hers discouragingly describes her biggest flaw as being “not interested in improving”.

It is, in truth, a dreadful choice. I know of many current and former MPs who are contemplating abstaining or spoiling their ballot paper. In July I rejoined the party for the purposes of voting in the leadership election. On reflection, the £39 membership fee could have been better spent.