Tory Party veers back to the right

Keir Starmer has now been in office as Britain’s prime minister for more than three months, but he still doesn’t know who he’s going to be facing as opposition leader – former prime minister Rishi Sunak remains in the job in a caretaker capacity. But a decision is on the way: ballots go out today to Conservative Party members, who have until the end of the month to choose between the final two candidates.

Yesterday we looked at the LDP’s leadership election in Japan, where MPs and party members both get a say in the same ballot. The Conservative Party has a different system; MPs vote first in a series of ballots to whittle the field down to two, then the members make the final choice. You can read my reports here and here explaining the last such vote, in 2022, which elected the hapless Liz Truss.

The intervening two years have been a bad time all round for the Tories. Truss quickly imploded, and the MPs then changed the rules to give themselves a greater say, which resulted in the unopposed election of Sunak. But after the party’s landslide defeat and Sunak’s resignation it went back to the old rules – except that now with a lot fewer MPs, the thresholds for nomination and elimination have been lowered.

Fewer MPs voting might have made the contest more predictable, and might have improved the ability of the different campaigns to engage in tactical voting. Instead the reverse seems to have happened, and the MPs have made a right mess of things.

The race started out with six candidates, three from the party’s hard right and three who, at least in a relative sense, could be described as moderates. The first two ballots, in September, eliminated one from each side; then there was a pause for the party conference, giving the surviving four contenders the opportunity to show their wares for the membership and the public.

The third ballot followed on Tuesday. James Cleverly, a moderate who got good reviews at the conference, jumped into the lead with 39 votes. He was followed by right-wingers Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch with 31 and 30 respectively, while the remaining moderate, Tom Tugendhat, was back on 20 and therefore eliminated.

It seemed therefore obvious that Cleverly would be one of the top two and that the question was merely who his opponent from the right would be. The aggregate balance between the two sides had not shifted much across the three ballots, so all along it was fair to assume that the members would end up choosing between a moderate and a right-winger.

But what actually happened was quite different. A substantial number of moderate MPs evidently decided that since Cleverly was safe, they could afford to throw their votes to Jenrick to ensure that he was in the top two rather than Badenoch, since on all accounts Badenoch was going to be much harder to beat in the members’ ballot. As you’ve probably guessed, they went too far. So many votes strayed from Cleverly that not only did he make no gain out of Tugendhat’s elimination, he actually went backwards, to 37.

Even that would not have been fatal, were it not for the fact that not all the benefit went to Jenrick. Apparently one of two other things happened (or possibly a combination of both):

• some of the moderate MPs instead of switching to Jenrick switched to Badenoch, figuring that the members were probably going to opt for a right-winger over Cleverly in any case, and that Badenoch would be less objectionable as leader; or
• some of Jenrick’s original supporters switched to Badenoch, figuring that the important thing was to stop Cleverly and thinking (no doubt correctly) that Badenoch was in a better position to beat him.

So Badenoch picked up votes as well, finishing in the lead with 42 against 41 for Jenrick, and Cleverly was the one eliminated. It’s a striking lesson in the risks of tactical voting. As an unnamed “senior MP” told the BBC, “I did warn colleagues that if they try to game the system they need to be careful about possible problems.”

There has been much angst and recrimination as a result, but the likelihood is that Cleverly would have lost the members’ ballot anyway. One poll did put him ahead of Jenrick, but that was in the immediate aftermath of the party conference; given a bit more time to reflect, I think party members would have reverted to their natural hard right allegiance, as they did in 2022 when Truss beat Sunak. And Badenoch was consistently beating all rivals in the party polls.

So for all the previous talk about the party needing to decide whether it would tack toward the centre or the right, its members have now been given a much more limited choice, between two versions of the right-wing agenda. Badenoch focuses more on culture war issues, while Jenrick is more the single-issue anti-immigration candidate. The betting market has installed Badenoch as a clear favorite, and there’s no doubt that she seems the more dynamic personality.

The next election, however, is a long way off. A new leader has plenty of time to make up ground, but also plenty of time to fall foul of the party’s fickle membership and succumb to the sort of internal warfare that has plagued the Conservatives for the last decade.