As Rishi Sunak prepares to step down, the race for a new Tory leader is underway. Although no one has officially announced they’ll run, there are already a number of names in the mix. Kemi Badenoch is a top contender, according to Conservative Home, which suggested that over a quarter of party members back the former business secretary – double the support of her closest competitors Robert Jenrick and Tom Tugendhat, each on 13 per cent.
And now Badenoch has received a public endorsement from her one-time parliamentary private secretary Alexander Stafford. The ex-MP for Rother Valley, who supported Boris Johnson throughout the Partygate scandal and campaigned for Liz Truss in 2022, has taken to the fine pages of the Telegraph to back his former boss.
Diagnosing his party’s problems, Stafford writes: ‘We have talked Right but governed Left’, adding that the pathway to Tory revival is a return to ‘principled Conservative ideology’ – so, er, talking right and governing right, one might say – with Badenoch at the helm. He went on:
If only a fraction of the Reform vote had gone to the Conservatives, tens of seats, including my own, would have stayed blue… While we are lucky to have several good candidates who are thinking of putting their name forward, there is a clear front runner who can slay the Reform dragon – Kemi Badenoch.
Alongside former home secretary Suella Braverman, Badenoch is expected to pitch herself as a ‘unite the right’ candidate – but a UCL Policy Lab and More in Common study published today has thrown that particular strategy into doubt. 70 per cent of people believe that rather than drifting too much to the political left or right, the Conservatives lost the election for being ‘incompetent’, adding that only 31 per cent of Reform voters selecting the Tories as their second choice – meaning Sunak’s boys in blue would still have lost badly.
Amid concerns about party infighting, Tory grandees Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Sir David Davis have both urged the party to take its time in picking a new leader. Meanwhile shadow foreign secretary Andrew Mitchell pointed to the past, noting that Michael Howard’s decision to remain Tory leader for seven months following his 2005 general election defeat was ‘pivotal’ to the success that followed under Cameron. How curious…
Lord Ashcroft’s unauthorised biography of Badenoch, Blue Ambition, is set to be published tomorrow. Will this boost Kemi’s bid to be the next Tory leader or, as with the curious case of Angela Rayner’s council house sale, raise some awkward questions? Stay tuned…
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