The run-up to this year’s Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham has been marked by the publication of Graham Brady’s tell-all memoir Kingmaker: Secrets, Lies and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers. “For 14 years, I kept entirely quiet about my discussions with the country’s leaders, even the most dramatic or absurd ones,” writes the erstwhile chairman of the infamous 1922 Committee of back-bench Tory MPs. “I was the model of discretion. Until now.”
The triumphs and most notably failures of those five prime ministers, meticulously documented in Brady’s book, the release of which is timed to cause maximum mischief, have culminated in an all-to-play for leadership contest of the kind the party has not experienced since 2005. The four candidates – Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat – will each have a 20-minute speaking slot to make their case to the membership of the party. While MPs will still get to whittle that list down to the final two, this “beauty pageant” is central to who ultimately emerges as the first leader of the opposition the party has had for 14 years.
This sets up this year’s conference to be somewhat fractious in mood. The 2023 conference, which the Tories went into having slumped to 20 points behind Labour in the polls, had the vibe of funeral; this year, a party insider gloomily suggested, “is more relatives squabbling over what turns out to be a meagre inheritance”. It is midway through an autopsy on what went so badly wrong, and there is little consensus on how to rebuild what has been so comprehensively broken. The four leadership contenders have mostly abided by the “yellow card” rule intended to prevent them taking jibes at each other, which has made this contest less vicious than it might have been. But there is little hope any of them can heal the party’s divisions, not least because they all served in at least one of the toxic administrations that led the Conservatives to this nadir.
Yet at the same time, this is a far more important conference than its immediate predecessors – in spite of the Tories’ fall from power. Instead of being packed with corporate lobbyists (who this year spent thousands of pounds to drink warm white wine), this is expected to be a members’ conference, with a sharp increase in individual registrations compared to recent years. Unlike other parties, the Tories do not allow members to vote on policy motions, meaning the main draw for members has historically been watching superstar cabinet ministers speak. When those cabinet ministers stopped being so starry, the “dregs of a government” gatherings post-Covid began to feel increasingly pointless. Not so now. “There’s a reason to be there this time,” one excited member told me. What happens in Birmingham next week will set the tone, in terms of politics and personnel, for the Conservatives’ journey back from their lowest point.
As it stands, there is much speculation about who the two finalists will be. Something would have to go quite wrong for Robert Jenrick, who is leading the pack after two rounds of MP votes with 33, not to get one of the slots. His carefully pitched Damascene conversion from Cameroon modernist to anti-immigration firebrand has so far gone down well; he is considered fearsomely ambitious, but with the intellectual acumen to confront a challenge of the scale facing the party. The received wisdom is that MPs usually select one candidate from the right of the party and one from the centre to put before the members, but it’s not clear that framework fits this time. Badenoch, who tends to top the membership surveys and has for months been considered the clear favourite, has positioned herself as a “sensible right-winger”. Her fans are heading to conference with the message that she is the only one who can stop Jenrick. But if MPs from the One Nation wing were to rally around a moderate and push Badenoch out of the race, Tom Tugendhat looks like best bet, most capable of the kind of rousing, vision-led speech that inspires members to leap to their feet in the conference hall, despite currently having the fewest number of declared MP supporters. And James Cleverly might still emerge as the “stop Jenrick” unity candidate.
After that, it will be in the hands of the membership, who, according to convention, tend to back whoever is the more right-wing option. But that wasn’t the case in 2005 when David Cameron triumphed over David Davis. (As the Conservative peer Lord Finkelstein once put it to me when I asked what happened then, “The party really wanted to win.”) And in a Jenrick versus Badenoch run-off, her reputation as a fighter and forthright style (“refreshingly honest”, as one Badenoch-backing member put it) give her the advantage.
Somewhat surprisingly, given it spans the entire parliamentary careers of all four contenders, Brady’s book has vanishingly little to say about any of the options to lead his party forwards. The man whose job for 14 years was to take the temperature of back-bench Conservatives and manage the (always uneasy, at times disastrous) dynamic between the parliamentary party and the government has many lessons for future Tory leaders in the form of cautionary tales, but hardly any for regular MPs. He does, however, offer two observations that hint at the mindset of the members soon heading off to Birmingham. First, that “parties always choose leaders as a foil to the opposing leader”; Cameron was selected, for example, as someone who could dazzle in the chamber opposite Tony Blair. Second, that “leaders are replaced by opposites”; Theresa May dull integrity, sandwiched between Cameron’s slick charm and Boris Johnson’s optimistic boosterism.
The upcoming beauty pageant is a chance for the candidates to demonstrate they have the dexterity, passion and sharp political instincts to move forwards where Rishi Sunak’s tin-eared technocracy led to paralysis. This, in a way, is the easy bit. But members will also be subconsciously looking out for someone who can project the kind of managerial competence that Keir Starmer has made a core part of his persona, which (recent freebie scandals aside) won him an election. For a candidate to do both, while also uniting the party around them, rather than fracturing it further, seems an almost impossible balance. No wonder Tory members are so despairing and so energised in equal measure.
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