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.
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