So the Conservative party is not going to try to become ‘more normal’ in the eyes of establishment centrists after all, but will instead chart a course towards becoming more conservative. After the astonishing elimination of James Cleverly from the Tory leadership contest this afternoon, Tory grassroots members are to be presented with a right-of-centre head-to-head between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick.
Badenoch will be favourite. But Jenrick could easily win off the back of his commitments on immigration policy and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and its supervisory court.
The result of this round of the contest is not what Reform leader Nigel Farage would have wanted
How Cleverly went from a poll-topping 39 votes yesterday to just 37 today, despite the votes of 20 supporters of his eliminated fellow centrist Tom Tugendhat being newly up for grabs, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps his role in the Chagos Islands debacle finally caught up with him. Perhaps a column by the Telegraph’s influential Allison Pearson – increasingly the voice of grassroots Tories – did for him after she declared that, if he won, she would be off to join Reform.
More likely, his team may have overcooked a vote-lending strategy designed to get Jenrick into the final two. That bit, at least, worked. The Newark MP scored 41 votes – an increase of ten over Tuesday’s result. But Badenoch also surged – up 12 to a poll-topping 42 votes.
Perhaps the most appropriate response to Cleverly’s demise is that which was supposedly uttered by the 19th century French diplomat Charles Talleyrand on hearing of the death of the Turkish ambassador: ‘I wonder what he meant by that?’
We need not detain ourselves for too long in seeking to explain the result, fascinating though it is to those of us who have earned our anoraks following Tory leadership races. The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.
While Badenoch’s camp were increasingly confident during the morning about making the last two, they believed like most of us that Cleverly would be the opponent. Their candidate was going to be both the ‘change’ contender and the right-wing one. Suddenly, they have an opposite problem to deal with: she may now be depicted as offering a less dramatic change of course than Jenrick, who is promising nothing less than a ‘New Conservative party’ based around five staunch core principles.
Badenoch’s supporters, from Jesse Norman to Laura Trott, certainly exude a more centrist vibe than those of Jenrick, such as Danny Kruger and Sir John Hayes. So if it is really true that the more right-wing person in the final two will win then Badenoch now has her work cut out to prove it is her.
There will be plenty of people she has crossed seeking to prove the opposite. Another Nadine Dorries salvo is almost certainly incoming, while comments Badenoch made in 2018 that seemed to welcome further relaxation of immigration controls will continue to be pumped out on social media by her detractors.
Jenrick’s achievement in making the last two of the leadership race just ten months after he resigned from the Rishi Sunak administration over immigration policy is quite remarkable. Some thought he had blown it with a conference speech that seemed to them a little over-intense compared to Cleverly’s affable uncle routine. Jenrick can claim to have developed the most comprehensive analysis of why the Tories lost so badly. Meanwhile, Badenoch can point to having fought for conservative values every day of the last parliament, making her a rarity among those who held senior ministerial positions.
While he is most unlikely to be admitting it in public, the result of this round of the Tory contest is not what Reform leader Nigel Farage would have wanted. A ‘business as usual’ Tory leader in the form of Cleverly would have presented him with an easier target than either Jenrick – who has pilfered many of his policies – or Badenoch, a fellow political pugilist.
Whichever of them wins through, the Tories are now set to go into the rest of the parliament – and the election beyond – having decisively broken from the centrist hegemony imposed on the party by David Cameron and George Osborne. The heirs to Blair are no more. The centre could not hold.
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