The Conservative party conference that begins on Sunday doubles as a beauty parade for the four remaining candidates to be Tory leader. Party elders have warned them not to engage in ugly tactics, however, with a yellow card system for “blue on blue” attacks.
The original six were whittled down following the elimination of former cabinet members Priti Patel and Mel Stride in votes by MPs. Two more will be eliminated in further votes by MPs on successive days on October 9th and 10th, before the final two duke it out in a poll of 170,000 party members over the rest of October.
Here are the contenders, and their prospects in the race to replace Rishi Sunak.
Kemi Badenoch (44)
The British-born, Nigeria-raised former business secretary began as the favourite but is now fighting to survive. Polls show she remains the most popular among ordinary members, but has fewer backers in the parliamentary party than her chief rival, Robert Jenrick.
Some MPs who prefer him may conspire to knock her out at the semi final stage by loaning their allegiance to another candidate, who would then be odds-on to be defeated by Jenrick in the final poll of members.
Badenoch, a former banker, will use Birmingham to underline her popularity with the Tory base. A self-declared “huge fan” of businessman Elon Musk, she paints herself as a similarly straight talker.
She appeals to the right of the party, but occasionally tangled with that cohort’s MPs when in cabinet. She would be an aggressive opposite number of Labour prime minister Keir Starmer, but some Tory MPs are wary of her propensity for conflict.
Badenoch has equivocated over whether Britain should leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), an issue that is a litmus test for candidates’ right-wing credentials.
The daughter of a doctor and academic, she was widely panned recently for claiming she “became working class” while working at McDonald’s. However, she is the candidate most feared by the rival Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage, with which the Tory party is locked in an existential battle.
If she can scrape into the final two, she will once again become the favourite.
Robert Jenrick (42)
The former solicitor and one-time junior minister in the Home Office has taken a sharp left-to-right swing in recent years. Once a Remainer, he is now a standard bearer for the hardline anti-immigration bloc. In the last vote by MPs he secured the backing of 33 versus Badenoch’s 28.
Jenrick rose to prominence last December when he quit as minister in protest at Sunak’s Rwanda immigration deportation policy, which he said was too soft. Jenrick advocates for withdrawal from the ECHR to speed up deportations.
He argued the party lost the election because it “lacked the courage to do the things that were necessary”. He has the backing of senior MPs such as former health secretary Victoria Atkins and Brexiteer Danny Kruger.
He is popular with party members and would be expected to defeat either of the two centrist candidates, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat, in the final ballot. But he lags Badenoch in polls of members and the public.
Many Labour politicians secretly hope Jenrick wins because they believe he would be a less effective leader of the opposition and might fail to end internal Tory chaos.
James Cleverly (55)
The former foreign secretary and home secretary has broader ideological appeal than the two leading candidates and is perceived as more moderate on key issues. Cleverly is also viewed as by far the most articulate of the contenders. That matters because the only thing the leader of the opposition can really do is talk.
He has the backing of only about half the MPs of, say, Jenrick, but will be aiming for a big splash in Birmingham so that he can knock out Tugendhat in the October 9th vote by MPs.
He may be an outsider but he is not, by any means, out of it. David Cameron was an outsider in the 2005 leadership battle heading into that year’s party conference, but the suave communicator’s strong performance at the event catapulted him to the top.
To have any chance, Cleverly must first overcome fellow centrist Tugendhat and then conspire in the elimination of Badenoch to face Jenrick in the final vote. His background as an army volunteer makes him popular with members, but he might struggle with immigration as a former home secretary who failed to solve the issue. Labour fears Cleverly the most, but he might struggle to ward off Reform.
Tom Tugendhat (51)
The rank outsider and former security minister would have to pull off a feat similar to the challenge facing Cleverly. He is probably the most left-leaning of the candidates, relatively speaking and is a favourite of One Nation Tory MPs. However, the party membership leans further to the right.
Like Cleverly, he also has a military background although Tugendhat’s is a far more prestigious one as a former officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he lacks his main rival’s face and name recognition.
This week he acknowledged the party had “lost the trust” of British people who saw Tories as only interested in arguing among themselves.
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