Tory MPs have accidentally knocked out their own man – and reminded voters why they lost the last election

T he Conservative party leadership ballot is a private affair. The MPs don’t have to reveal who they voted for if they don’t want to. And given how badly they appear to have bungled their final round of voting in this contest, it seems unlikely we’ll ever know what really happened.

James Cleverly was the firm favourite among MPs, and yet an attempt to manoeuvre him into the final two against the candidate his supporters felt most sure of beating in the final run-off when party members vote seems to have backfired.

It would appear Cleverly and his supporters forgot Lyndon B. Johnson’s first rule of politics – learn to count. As a result, party members now have a choice between two right-wing candidates, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch. Both are popular among members but less electable and palatable for the wider public. The debacle has exposed (not for the first time) the problems with the electoral system.

Cleverly was seen as the unifier of the party, with the ministerial experience and communication skills to help with a transformation. He had wowed party conference with a well-calibrated speech hinting that the party needed to “normalise” to regain trust. Yet his record leaves questions as to exactly how good his communication skills are in reality. He has made several “jokes”, which were not jokes at all – just offensive comments – and reportedly described his own government’s immigration policy as “batshit”.

A Telegraph article just before his shock loss in the parliamentary party vote feared he would “sign the death warrant” of the party as a “middle-of-the-road bluffer who tickles the tummies of members of the parliamentary party by flattering them that their historic defeat was not so bad after all”. Yet judging by the audible gasps when the result was announced, Tory MPs were shocked at how they had messed the vote up. Both the Liberal Democrats and Labour reacted with glee at the news.

The final two

Badenoch has less ministerial experience than Cleverly but is loved by the Tory party as a battler and is now the favourite to win. The same “death warrant” article called Badenoch a “Warrior Queen”, but that cuts both ways. Badenoch, by channelling her inner Thatcher, is pitching herself as a fighter taking on the forces of reaction within and without. But, to quote another Tory, the Duke Of Wellington, Thatcher would only fight battles she knew she could win. Badenoch’s battle seems rather less focused, and her war on the forces of woke now includes new mothers and civil servants (10% of whom, in her view, should be in prison).

Another recent article, this time in the Guardian, spoke of how “she often finds it hard to get through an interview without patronising or arguing with the presenter in a manner that reinforces claims she’s divisive and abrasive.” At the same time, her attempt to tell “hard truths” saw her publishing a lengthy pamphlet featuring some triangles – seemingly explaining electoral realignment – which no one could understand. Not ideal attributes for a leader.

So far in this contest, Jenrick’s most notable interventions have been to grandstand about the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), compete to be toughest on immigration, and (and we need to follow the logic slowly here) argue that the ECHR is causing UK special forces to kill instead of capture terrorists. Jenrick is the living embodiment of the old Groucho Marx joke “those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others.” He has made either a Damascene or cynical journey from squishy centre to hard right just ahead of this contest. What does he really believe? No one is sure.

The reasons for the Tories’ recent catastrophic election loss are in plain sight. Voters saw the Conservative governments as a toxic combination of poor delivery, scandals and being out of touch. The 2024 defeat was a combination of Boris Johnson’s immorality and Liz Truss’s incompetence. Rishi Sunak then finally fractured his own coalition with a self-defeating immigration policy. None of the candidates have addressed the reasons for the loss, and the final two are evidently still in denial.

But it is the Tory members who are voting here. Their version of events is that disunity and a failure to deliver on immigration lost them power. Members may well be torn, as political scientist Tim Bale points out, between values and electability – though with Cleverly out, this latter may be a problem.

Peering through the fog of the contest, there are two things which are very likely. First, Johnson’s shifting of the party to the right, and his closer alignment of the Tory party with the remnants of UKIP is now more evident, and will be further deepened by whoever wins. While Badenoch and Jenrick differ on whether they should beat or join Reform, the Tory party is now on the latter’s territory. There is unlikely to be any Tory “hard truths” to address the electorate’s loss of trust in the party, but instead the talking points will be culture wars, immigration, and leaving the ECHR.

Second, as a result, the party will move further from the centre ground, and away from the average voter, and their concerns. The mess the parliamentary party has made of the contest and the long shadow of dysfunctional leadership have served only to remind voters of the reasons why the party was thrown out of office in July. Peering through his snazzy new glasses, Starmer can see his bad week just got a lot better.

Sources:

▪ This piece was originally published in The Conversation and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 16 October 2024. | The authors write in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/Conservative Party. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)