And then there were two. Either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick will be the next Conservative leader. This is a contest that, for the first time since members were given the final say, will really go down to the wire. Whoever wins, the Tory party looks set to change radically.
Badenoch’s list is peppered with centrists of the highfalutin and careerist kinds
When Iain Duncan Smith made the final two back in 2001, it was clear that he would beat Ken Clarke. The outcome of the tussle between Davids Cameron and Davis in 2005 was pretty much a foregone conclusion after Eton Dave’s Chinese takeaway of a speech – very yummy, what was in it again? – at party conference.
Of the more recent contests, by late summer 2022, we all knew that Liz Truss had beaten Rishi Sunak very comfortably, well before the result was declared. In 2019, meanwhile, it was obvious that Boris Johnson, the grassroots’ darling, was going to crush Jeremy Hunt.
This contest, however, is genuinely hard to call. Betting markets tell us that Kemi Badenoch has approximately a two-thirds chance of winning and Robert Jenrick about a one-third chance. Those odds put a lot of weight on past membership surveys conducted by the Conservative Home website, and also the assumption that grassroots’ opinion is not particularly responsive to energetic campaigning.
There is a school of thought that says the Tory membership is less biased to the right than it used to be, because of major exoduses when Johnson was toppled by MPs and, to a lesser extent, after the defenestration of Truss. There is no centrist candidate this time, however, and it is not even obvious which of the surviving pair is more right-wing.
Looking at the declared list of MP supporters that this magazine helpfully keeps updated, there is no doubt that Jenrick has hoovered up most of the robust right, from Sir John Hayes to Danny Kruger and Edward Leigh to Andrew Rosindell.
Badenoch’s list meanwhile is peppered with centrists of both the highfalutin and careerist kinds, a campaign team where Jesse Norman meets Laura Trott. But then again, she’s Kemi. She has shown real gumption by refusing to match Jenrick’s crowd-pleasing policy of guaranteeing European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) withdrawal from any future administration led by him.
Jenrick’s reassurances that all shadow ministers and all Tory candidates at the next election would have to back withdrawal are eye-catching. But perhaps he has forgotten that it would only take 25 disgruntled One Nationers to defect to the Lib Dems to make Ed Davey the Leader of the Opposition.
Badenoch’s campaign pitch – basically ‘trust me, I’m an engineer’ – offers members and MPs alike the calmer vista of a design process, starting from first principles and ending with stress-tested policy. The effect of that, if not the intent, is to postpone a lot of difficult and potentially divisive decisions.
Both camps expect most members to have voted by next weekend. My sense, from a couple of anecdotal straws in the wind in local associations, is that Badenoch is indeed in front. In which case, Jenrick has a matter of days to change the game. Stand by for explosions.
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