Priti Patel is out of the race to be the next Tory leader. In the stuffy (but decidedly not crowded) Committee Room 14, where the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs hosts its meetings, the results of the first round of MP voting were announced with very little fanfare as follows:
Robert Jenrick: 28
Kemi Badenoch: 22
James Cleverly: 21
Tom Tugendhat: 17
Mel Stride: 16
Priti Patel: 14
With all the usual caveats that it is impossible to predict much at this stage due to the arcane nature of the process (as I wrote earlier today), there are some interesting takeaways from this initial insight into how Conservative MPs are feeling.
The most immediate is that the right of the party has clearly coalesced around its preferred candidate. Jenrick has been gunning for the role of right-wing standard bearer since he resigned from Rishi Sunak’s cabinet at the end of last year over the Rwanda bill. In standing down on a matter of principle, allies suggested he had shown integrity (as opposed to Suella Braverman, who was sacked), and his star has only risen since. The fact that Braverman didn’t even put herself forward for this race, knowing that she would fail to win enough parliamentary support to get on the ballot, was the first sign that this faction had moved onto a new champion. That Priti Patel, once the undisputed darling of the Tory right, has fallen at the first round of voting is the second.
In contrast, the fight to be the candidate of the moderates is much more open. The expectation was that Mel Stride, the candidate with the least name recognition and closest association with Rishi Sunak, would be eliminated first. In fact, Stride is just one vote behind Tom Tugendhat, who was until this afternoon considered the leading One Nation contender. Tugendhat had a strong launch yesterday, but MPs from the centre of the party may now be reassessing his viability as a candidate in favour of James Cleverly.
That Kemi Badenoch did not come first, despite topping all the polls so far, is also interesting. As previously discussed, she is not a natural networker and hasn’t been working the parliamentary party as hard as some of her rivals, perhaps feeling that she doesn’t need to. But she is the clear favourite in local associations, and one might expect Tory MPs to back her leadership from the get-go out of a sense of inevitability, perhaps in the hope of a shadow cabinet role.
For now, the key question is where Patel’s 16 votes go in the next round. Do they get hoovered up by Jenrick as the candidate of the right? Or by Badenoch, as the frontrunner? Or another candidate entirely, on the grounds that MPs are complex creatures who do not switch en masse from one column to another? We’ll find out early next week. But already, the vastly reduced size of the parliamentary party is having an impact. Just two MPs switching to Patel’s cause (or a single MP backing her instead of Stride) could have set a very different tone for this contest.
[See also: The Grenfell report is damning for David Cameron]
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