Since the start of the seemingly interminable race to replace Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party, I have argued that the contest is impossible to predict.
This might seem like a cop-out – and in a way I suppose it is. But the undercurrents of this long drawn-up process are so complex and volatile, with so few MPs involved in making the decisions, that there have been surprises at every stage.
Indeed, while James Cleverly was widely considered to have been the winner of conference, it was a surprise when he rocketed so far ahead in yesterday’s voting round, taking the lead with 39 votes – just one short of the 40 needed to guarantee him a place in the members’ run-off.
An even bigger surprise was in store today. Far from hoovering up the votes of Tom Tugendhat, who was eliminated yesterday, Cleverly lost two backers. The final result put him on 37 and knocking him out, with Robert Jenrick on 40 and Kemi Badenoch on 41.
What happened? How did Cleverly go backwards, and why did the votes of the more centrist Tugendhat seemingly end up split between two right-wingers?
Tory leadership contests always throw up accusations of vote-lending shenanigans, whereby a leading candidate may encourage some of their backers to vote for someone else, in the hope of knocking out the rival they deem most dangerous. It’s a risky game – as Cleverly may have found out. Rumours are already swirling that his team got their numbers wrong, with an attempt to block either Jenrick or Badenoch from getting to the final two backfiring horribly.
It is of course equally possible that it was yesterday’s result that was the shenanigan-driven one, with one candidate lending votes to Cleverly to lull his team into a false sense of security. That might also explain why Jenrick lost a vote between the pre-conference round and yesterday. Although looking at the head-to-head survey of members conducted by ConservativeHome just after conference, it’s not clear why Team Jenrick would prefer to face Badenoch than Cleverly. If anything, it is Badenoch who would benefit most from knocking out Cleverly.
We will likely never know what happened – at least not until Cleverly publishes his memoirs. What we do know is that the next Tory leader will come from the right of the party. It’s a reality that is already dividing the party between enthusiasm and despair.
By eliminating Cleverly, Tory MPs have denied members the chance to vote for someone focused on winning back voters from the Liberal Democrats – a fact that will delight Ed Davey. The strongest media performer and most generally likeable of the candidates (as I’ve said before, it’s hard to find anyone in Westminster with something negative to say about him), Cleverly offered the possibility of reinventing the party’s image to appeal to “normal people” (as one backer put it). He had the most government experience of all the candidates, and was party chairman during the successful 2019 election – something he and his supporters argued gave him the highest chance of bringing the Tories back into power after just one term.
And yet, for many in the party Cleverly was considered a bit of a lightweight, in terms of both conservative ideology and of his record. Critics argue the focus on his charisma and communications skills was overhyped, and masked a surface-level grasp of the challenges facing the party and a lack of clear direction for how to tackle them.
That isn’t really a criticism one can launch at Badenoch or Jenrick. While both are considered on the right, they actually represent quite different strands of the party.
Jenrick’s pitch at conference was more populist in nature: unite the right by moving the Tories closer to Reform and winning back voters tempted by Nigel Farage. Controlling immigration is the centrepiece of his platform, with the narrative that he was radicalised by seeing quite how dysfunctional the Home Office is when he was a minister there. Throw in a bit of Maggie appreciation (he gave his daughter the middle name Thatcher, after all), and you can see his attempt to be painted as the “traditional Tory” candidate.
Badenoch, meanwhile, is offering something different and altogether more modern: focused less on immigration as the be-all-and-end-all, and more on reinventing Britain’s institutions – and, indeed, Britain – along conservative lines. Comments about how “HR is running the economy right now” and how “liberalism has been hacked” suggest a world-view that isn’t about reforming one part of the state, however important, but fundamentally rethinking what the state is and how it works.
Whether any of this appeals to the average voter, who is likely far more concerned about failing public services than wokeness in corporate HR departments, isn’t really relevant right now. It’s the sort of talk that excites and enthuses Conservative members (Badenoch inspires a fierce kind of personal loyalty among her supporters, just as she also inspires derision from her detractors) and we can expect to hear much more of it in the hustings over the next few weeks. Expect a hardening of rhetoric on immigration from Jenrick in response (something else to bring a smile to Ed Davey’s face – and perhaps even Keir Starmer’s).
Today’s shock result suggests a party, as is so often the temptation, about to respond to a brutal election defeat by retreating towards its base. There is clearly a lot of thinking to be done in the wilderness, whoever is the next leader. As to whether that will ultimately be Jenrick or Badenoch, for once I feel profoundly confident in my assessment that, right now, it’s impossible to predict.
[See also: Boris Johnson’s performance art]
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