Whenever something unexpected happens in politics, two questions immediately arise: how the hell did it happen, and what does it mean? With the latest twist in the Conservative leadership race, the first of these at least presents no obvious answers. James Cleverly would have gone to bed on Tuesday night overwhelmingly confident he would progress to the final two of the contest. He had topped the third round of voting by Tory MPs, had clear momentum, and was the bookmakers’ favourite. Those certainties came crashing down at 3.30pm on Wednesday, as the result of the fourth and final round of the parliamentary vote was read out to assembled journalists and MPs: Cleverly had somehow lost two votes, and was out of the race. Tory members will instead pick from Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick.
This was a turnaround in fate both sudden and unexpected. Cleverly, widely seen as the star of last week’s Tory conference, had on Tuesday been just one short of the 40 MPs backers needed to guarantee progression in a three-horse race with 120 voters. He had definite momentum. Jenrick, the previous favourite, was tipped to go. The immediate suspicion was that something nefarious had been going on – either other camps lending votes to Cleverly on Tuesday to inflate his backing, or Cleverly’s camp seeking to boost Jenrick’s support to make sure the shadow home secretary faced him rather than the more starry and charismatic Badenoch in the members’ vote. However, instead of a conspiracy-based effort to sway the contest, what seems more likely is a cock-up: a series of individual MPs trying to vote in ways they believed might help their candidate, with unintended consequences.
Yes, some MPs will have simply changed their mind when presented with a different choice. But others might have sought to nudge the result a certain way. For example, the assumption had been that most of Tom Tugendhat’s 20 supporters would migrate to fellow centrist Cleverly after he was knocked out of the race on Tuesday. But one Tugendhat backer told reporters they were instead picking Badenoch, in an effort to get Jenrick eliminated as they so disliked his policies. That was just one MP. But when your entire dataset is 120 people – there are 121 Tory MPs but Rishi Sunak, the outgoing party leader, was not voting – it only needed a relatively small change to create a significant effect. That is, of course, a variation of the oldest and most significant lesson in politics: learn how to count. The other lesson, at least for some Tory MPs, is perhaps that they are not the 4D chess strategic masters they like to think they are. This takes us to the second question – what does it mean? The most obvious answer to this is that it leaves Conservative members with a relatively narrow choice, between two candidates firmly of the populist right in the party. Yes, there are notable differences of both policy and approach. Jenrick will present himself as the candidate with a plan, one based largely around slashing migration, notably an immediate withdrawal from the European convention on human rights, but also focusing on the NHS and the economy. Badenoch’s policy palette is less obviously doctrinaire, and she will make much of her background as an engineer, and her desire to puzzle out solutions to the UK’s ills. She is, however, a keen and vocal culture warrior, with a delight in picking fights with opponents, sometimes over fairly trivial issues. While gauging the size of the Tory membership, let alone its views, can be a tricky business, the working assumption is they tend to lean further right than the party’s MPs, and so are unlikely to overly object to such a choice. What could be more problematic, and more significant, is that fact that Tory voters are a much broader church, and many of them already have fled a party they felt was becoming overly Reform UK-adjacent under leaders from Boris Johnson onwards. Both Jenrick and Badenoch are likely to pursue former Tories who supported Nigel Farage’s party in the election, which could open up more space for Labour, and especially the Liberal Democrats. “Christmas has come early in the blue wall,” one Lib Dem official said, referring to the commuter belt seats where the party removed dozens of Conservative MPs in July. The official party account reacted to the news by tweeting a brief video clip of a yellow Lib Dem tractor crashing through a wall of blue hay bales. Will such triumphalism, much like Cleverly’s confidence, prove misplaced? Only time will tell. One thing, however, remains certain: even in opposition, the Conservatives have not lost their ability to surprise.