Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick are through to the final two of the Tory leadership contest as a shock ballot of MPs dumps out the frontrunner James Cleverly. The Mail has more.
Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch will battle it out for the Tory crown after MPs sensationally evicted frontrunner James Cleverly tonight.
A day of extraordinary behind-the-scenes manoeuvring at Westminster culminated in the bombshell departure of the Shadow Home Secretary.
Having come first in the ballot of his colleagues yesterday, Mr. Cleverly slumped to third on 37 – behind both Ms Badenoch on 42 and Robert Jenrick on 41.
There were audible gasps in the Parliamentary committee room as the figures were read out.
The result sparked a bitter blame game between bewildered Tories – often described as the most duplicitous electorate in the world – with fevered speculation about dirty tricks by rival camps.
Some claimed that Mr. Cleverly’s allies had “loaned” support to Mr. Jenrick in a bid to secure an easier opponent in the vote by party members.
Others suggested the opposite, that Mr. Jenrick had marshalled extra backing for Mr. Cleverly in the previous round and then recalled it.
However, both teams denied using double-dealing tactics, and the reaction from many MPs was confusion.
Asked what had happened, one despairing MP who backed Mr. Cleverly said: “God knows.” They added: “Tory MPs are too inward looking.”
Other Conservatives griped that too many MPs were “thought they were in House of Cards“. Mr. Cleverly himself admitted it was “massively disappointing”.
Mr. Cleverly had taken a surprise lead in the vote yesterday, having been praised for his strong speech to party conference in Birmingham last week.
However, despite taking on the mantle of bookies’ favourite he slumped to third in a fourth and final round of Westminster voting this afternoon.
He had been expected to pick up most of the moderate votes of supporters of Tom Tugendhat, who was knocked out yesterday.
But he actually lost votes, which will fuel suspicions that his backers loaned too many votes to Mr. Jenrick in order to keep Ms. Badenoch out the final two today.
One veteran Tory aide said: “Some must have left James to try and stop the Right-winger they liked least… the Cleverly whips have lost control of the numbers.”
The shock will see Mr. Jenrick, the former Immigration Minister go up against Ms. Badenoch, the ex-Business Secretary, who is seen as the favourite of the grassroots, in a ballot of party member. The result will be announced on November 2nd.
It means that the next leader will be from the Right of the party, with both candidates taking a hard line on issues including immigration and woke culture.
Worth reading in full.
With two Right-of-centre candidates battling for members’ support, it’s certainly going to make for the most interesting Tory leadership race in a long while.
Personally I’ve been more encouraged by Jenrick’s strong stance on immigration and his five core principles for a “new Conservative party” than I have by Badenoch’s more equivocal comments on the ECHR – and her 2018 support for relaxing immigration rules hardly helps here (though she has since distanced herself from that). Jenrick has the kudos of quitting over the Sunak Government’s failure to get the Rwanda scheme right. On the other hand, his recent dismissive comments about the “culture war” were worrying – you’d never hear Kemi say anything like that! – and it appears that many people doubt the sincerity of his journey from wet centrist to hardliner. Call me naïve, but I tend to think that on immigration at least it is a genuine change of outlook born of fruitless years spent at the Government coalface. But I have to admit he might be putting at least some of it on. After all, politicians, and perhaps Tories especially, are notorious for saying one thing before an election and doing another on the other side of it. Surely, though, he must know he will crash and burn if that is his game. Kemi is a solid political performer who takes the fight to her opponents, a key quality in an opposition leader. But she also shoots from the hip – her maternity pay comments being an obvious example of a gaffe at a key moment of a kind she may be prone to.
All in all, at this point I’m rooting for a Jenrick victory – and trusting he’s good as his word. But the great thing about this contest is that I’d also be perfectly happy with a Badenoch win – as long as she tightens up her immigration stance.
The elephant in the room is that there will at some point need to be some kind of entente with Reform, if only because a divided Right can’t beat even a weak and unpopular Labour, and many Right-leaning voters will never trust the Tories again. For the benefit of the Tory faithful all candidates have foresworn such a deal, which is good politics for this leadership contest but will have to be revisited in the run-up to the next election when the lie of the land becomes clear. In the meantime we’re stuck with the Loony Left in charge of the country. We just have to hope the Right – both in the Conservative party and outside it – can get its act together and topple Starmer’s dysfunctional rabble in 2029 and spare us any more of its reign of misery than we have to endure.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.