Conservative MPs could be forgiven for taking things a bit slowly this summer. “They’re absolutely knackered,” said John Oxley. “Even in the safest seats they were fighting for their lives. Some of them, certainly, are only going to be thinking about the race closely now.”
Despite that sleepiness, the race is certainly under way: throughout August, the candidates have been making their case to members. Tom Tugendhat has visited more than 100 associations, while Robert Jenrick (who launched his campaign yesterday) got to 16 in the last week, Jessica Elgot, Pippa Crerar and Peter Walker report in this piece. Badenoch, on the other hand, has faced a certain amount of criticism for missing several events in favour of a summer break. (You can see profiles of all six candidates here.)
“They’re laying the groundwork,” Oxley said. “It’s been a meet-30-people-in-someone’s-back-garden kind of contest.”
With parliament returning, and the first vote among MPs this week, that will now crank up. Priti Patel and Mel Stride are thought to be most likely to be eliminated on Wednesday, but nothing is certain. “If there was a pecking order before the contest with Badenoch the favourite, it seems very hard to read now,” Oxley said. “It really is all to play for.”
The campaign so far
The candidates might have been meeting the rank and file – but the shadow audience is Conservative MPs, who will narrow the field to two before it goes to the members. Much of the work in August has been undertaken with that in mind, Oxley said. “They are talking to the most engaged people in the membership,” he said. “Even if an MP has 600 or 700 members, there will be 15 they really hear from. A bit of buzz in that group might have some influence on their choice.”
While the hustings have been closed to the press, there hasn’t been much of the “blue-on-blue” hostility familiar from the Truss-Sunak race reported – perhaps because of a “yellow-card” system that punishes candidates for briefing against rivals.
“It’s been relatively good-tempered,” Oxley said. “They’re all trying to show that they are the candidate who can pull the party back together.”
Kemi Badenoch will hope to present herself as the frontrunner at her launch event later today. She will say that the Tories must resist having “the same policy arguments from the last parliament”.
She is not alone in arguing that her party must move on: Jenrick has said that the party must avoid “going down a rabbit hole of culture wars”, and James Cleverly warned this weekend that “we have had the tone that we’re the grumpy party”.
“He is rooting his pitch in being an affable person who wants to bring unity,” Oxley said. “The communications from Priti Patel to members are all about how the party is organised, and how the membership should be involved.”
The race with the members
A JL Partners poll published yesterday had Jenrick just in the lead among members, with Tugendhat, Badenoch and Patel close behind. (It left Cleverly and Stride out, for some reason.) A recent YouGov poll had Kemi Badenoch leading among members, with 24%, and Tom Tugendhat in second on 16%. A Techne UK poll commissioned by James Cleverly had, er, James Cleverly first with 26%, and Priti Patel second with 20%.
Who knows, in other words. “The race is in flux and it will keep changing,” Oxley said. “And it is very hard to reach solid projections for the membership based on the samples that polls generally manage to get.”
One factor is that party members may not adhere to their factional disposition as rigidly as you might expect. “I heard about someone very staunchly right-wing saying how lovely Tom Tugendhat [a moderate] seemed to be.” Tugendhat is also the candidate who is most popular with the public, a Savanta poll found.
The race does not appear to be highlighting grand ideological differences, Oxley added. “It’s less about what they believe, and more about what they’re focusing on.”
The message to MPs
The most useful thing for Cleverly in that (slightly dubious, it should be noted) poll is that it claims he would beat any other candidate in the final two. “That’s going to be really important,” Oxley said. “One big reason to woo the membership is so that MPs who might not have you as their first choice will see you as the person who can beat the candidate they really don’t want.”
Not many MPs have made public endorsements yet. They may be waiting to get back to Westminster, and get a better sense of which way the wind is blowing: a shadow ministerial job might be at stake, after all. Since the vote is a secret ballot, they are quite free to tell everyone they’re on their side.
Oxley notes that most of the new MPs became engaged in politics during the David Cameron era. Meanwhile, the classes of 2015, 2017, and 2019 have been significantly weakened. (For more on this change in dynamic, see this First Edition with Sam Freedman from last month.) “The shape of the parliamentary electorate has changed,” Oxley said. “One of the reasons Suella Braverman didn’t stand is that an awful lot of her constituency just disappeared.”
The crunch point
While this week’s vote will start to clarify the picture, “the really important thing is going to be conference,” Oxley said. When the party meets in Birmingham at the end of September, the four remaining candidates will make speeches pitching themselves to MPs and members alike. “In the last contest fought this way, in 2005, that disrupted everything: Cameron exceeded all expectations, and from there he blew David Davis away.”
In the end, and even though the tone from most at the moment is about establishing themselves with a broad base, it remains likely that there will be a candidate representing the right of the party and a rival picked as the most plausible contender to beat them.
You might guess that that will mean Jenrick, who one supporter called “the nicer face of Suella [Braverman]”, against Badenoch – who is clearly on the right, but has picked up support from centrists – or the more moderate Tugendhat. On the other hand, there are also reports that an “anyone but Badenoch” effort is underway. So it it really is only a guess.
While the relative civility of the contest so far has avoided negative headlines, it comes with a caveat: “Before it started, there was an idea that this would be a postmortem and a big conversation about the future,” Oxley said. “But everyone running was involved, and they’re trying to win the support of people who were involved. So it’s hard to be brutally honest.”
With the race taking so long, “it’s created a really fallow period with very little organised opposition and very little deep reflection,” he added. It may also mean that the Conservative party emerges with a new face at the top – but no game-changing diagnosis of what, exactly, went so wrong.
