Mel Stride has been eliminated from the race to be Tory leader.
In the second round of MP voting, the results were as follows:
Robert Jenrick: 33
Kemi Badenoch: 28
James Cleverly: 21
Tom Tugendhat: 21
Mel Stride: 16
That means the four contenders going forward to make their case at Conservative Party Conference at the end of this month are Jenrick, Badenoch, Cleverly and Tugendhat.
Stride’s elimination isn’t a surprise. (If anything the shock was that he made it through to round two in the first place.) But the split of support in the last MP vote before Conference shows two separate contests underway: one to be the candidate of the right, and one to challenge from the centre.
When Priti Patel was eliminated last week, the big question was where the 14 votes for her would go. Patel comes from the right of the party (although, as David Gauke has explained today, her campaign faltered in part because she did not play up that element of her politics as much as she could have). Given this, you would expect her backers to switch to Jenrick or Badenoch, who are both positioning themselves as right-wing champions.
Jenrick received five more votes than last week, Badenoch six. That leaves Jenrick going into conference season with the momentum of leading the pack, but with the clear sense that the right of the party has not yet chosen who it will coalesce around. Badenoch, meanwhile, has lost some of the glitz of being the presumed winner for much of this year. She is still very much in contention, but will need a strong performance at Conference (she is, of course, popular with the members and considered a powerful speaker) to ensure she gets to the final two. MPs will be reluctant to eliminate a candidate who can rouse the Conference Hall to its feet.
Interestingly, Tugendhat has picked up six four votes after a disappointing first round last week. That puts him level with Cleverly. Have some MPs really switched from darling of the right Priti Patel to One Nation stalwart Tom Tugendhat? Or is there, as has been alleged, some cunning horse-trading going on whereby votes are “leant” from one campaign to influence who is eliminated when? We won’t know until the post-Conference rounds when MPs will continue to whittle this lot down to the final two. But taking the votes at face value, Cleverly and Tugendhat are fighting it out to be the “not Jenrick” candidate.
As I noted last week, the reduced size of the Conservatives’ parliamentary party is really making itself felt, with just 12 votes separating the highest and lowest ranked candidates now. This is still a deeply fractured party. The mood at Conference is going to be feverish.
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