Expect a Tory leadership race mired in bitter and personal fights

Good morning. Seven Conservative MPs — Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat — have signalled that they are running for the party leadership. Among them, Cleverly and Tugendhat, have officially declared.

Given that government ministers will need to take a holiday in the next month or so, the Tory leadership election will be, I think, the story of the summer. The 1922 committee’s decision not to winnow the field down at all before that means that we will have multiple candidates vying for power over the summer, which seems like a recipe for a season of internal division and bad blood. (Our story on the full timetable is here.)

As such, I don’t anticipate that I will write about it again until the parliamentary recess, but for now, some thoughts about the state of the contest as it begins.

To the right, to the right

When people ask me who I think will win the Conservative leadership race, I can only say that I know I don’t know.

The election defeat of Penny Mordaunt — the candidate who it was pretty clear would take some beating among the Tory grassroots — blows the contest wide open. Kemi Badenoch starts as the frontrunner, but like all the other candidates she could easily come unstuck.

One reason why the race is hard to predict is we know less about the party membership than you might think, simply because some members have defected to Reform, and the overall impact of that is uncertain.

What I do know is where the leadership election will principally be fought and won: the Telegraph, the Mail, the Spectator, the BBC and GB News. ConservativeHome’s party members’ survey showed at the start of the year that more than half of their panel members watch GB News regularly. Although the survey consistently tilts a little further to the right than the party membership as a whole, it has always proved a reliable barometer for activist sentiment in the party. Until proven otherwise we should continue to see it as a good guide to where the opposition is going.

That’s why both James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat have marked their campaign launches with pieces in the Telegraph. The two men are both fishing in a similar pool among the party’s MPs, though Cleverly starts with more credibility on the party’s right, having been one of the first in and last out of Boris Johnson’s government. But because both have come to be identified with the party’s moderates, they are both saying similar things: the Labour party can be beaten in a single term, and I’m the candidate who can win. (“I’m the candidate who can win” is always code for “but you, the party faithful, are not necessarily going to like how I go about doing it”.)

At the same time, both candidates, Tugendhat in particular, have been willing to repeat the right’s preferred shibboleths in their leadership pitch. The former security minister said the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights if it made it harder for the country to “control our own borders”.

This means this contest will come down to claims about which candidate is most trustworthy when it comes to their pledges for the party leadership: a dynamic that is likely to make the fight bitterly personal, as so much will depend on how the candidates explain how their character makes them a superior choice for the party’s next leader.

Now try this

I cooked mushrooms and polenta from Claudia Roden’s excellent cookbook Med last night, and they were very good too if I do say so myself. Roden was interviewed by the FT on the publication of Med, which you can read here.

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