Members of the Conservative Party gathered in Birmingham on Sunday for the party’s annual conference, a slimmed down affair just 12 weeks after the party was hammered by Labour in the general election.
Barely 10,000 are expected to attend, roughly half the size of Labour’s conference last week in Liverpool. The Tory conference also departs from tradition in that it will not culminate in a speech by the party leader on Wednesday morning.
Instead, the climax will see the four remaining contenders who are vying to replace Rishi Sunak as leader – Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat – make their pitches on Wednesday in the main hall at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in the city centre.
The whole event is basically a glorified beauty parade for the leadership battle. Tory MPs will then whittle the four contenders down to two in elimination votes on October 9th and 10th, before the party’s 70,000 or so members pick the winner in an online poll through the rest of October.
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The Tories may be no longer in government, but security at the ICC was still extremely tight as delegates began arriving on Sunday afternoon, with armed police visible all around the compound.
Inside in the exhibition area, the four leadership candidates had set up stalls offering tongue-in-cheek merchandise to arriving Tory members, from Mr Tugendhat’s cans of spray tan to Mr Cleverly’s “no leaks” water bottles.
Much like the Tories’ final few years in government, immigration was set to become one of the main themes of the conference and also the leadership battle, in which Mr Jenrick and Ms Badenoch are seen as front-runners.
However, Ms Badenoch, a former business secretary, became engulfed in a row on Sunday over comments she made in a Times Radio interview, where she was accused of suggesting that Britain’s maternity pay was “excessive”.
In response to a question about the state and its rates of maternity pay, seen as low by OECD standards, she told an interviewer that there was “too much government” and that it could be expected to solve every issue in society.
“Every time there is an issue, or someone has a question, the answer cannot be ‘well, let’s help the government to help people have babies, or let the government create a football regulator, or ban people smoking in gardens’,” she said. “It’s excessive.”
The other leadership candidates capitalised on her remarks to portray her as heartless, in an echo of comments over motherhood made by Andrea Leadsom in 2016 that were credited with torpedoing her leadership chances that year against the childless Theresa May.
Ms Badenoch later back-pedalled on the remarks, but the row put her on the back foot as the conference kicked off. She has until Wednesday to repair the damage.
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