There’s a particular type of column, upsettingly common in British newspapers over the past few years, that can be summarised thus: “As a supporter of the Conservative party, here’s what Labour should do next.” These have always baffled me. Compromising to appeal to swing voters is one thing, but why should a political party listen to those who outright want it to fail?
All of which is a long way of saying there are very good reasons not to listen to me. Nonetheless, I am baffled that James Cleverly is not the clear favourite in the race for Tory leader. And I suspect this fact says rather a lot about the mess the party has got itself into.
Cleverly has, to be fair, acquired a reputation for gaffes. “Is James Cleverly the most gaffe-prone cabinet minister in history?” asks the Independent. He has momentarily forgotten which Cabinet job he has; described the main plank of his own government’s policies as “bat shit”; accused the Labour party, just this week, of a betrayal in the Chagos Islands through a policy that, it turned out, he helped negotiate. Some of those gaffes, like suggesting the ideal spouse is “always mildly sedated so she can never realise there are better men out there”, suggest attitudes which might politely be described as “unreconstructed”.
On the other side of the ledger, though, he is one of the few ministers to have emerged from the last few years of Tory government with his reputation intact: he held two of the great offices of state, and seems to be respected by colleagues (not a small thing, this). More importantly from an electoral perspective, he seems like a normal person. This, at a time when the main threat to the right is its increasingly online weirdness, should surely be a selling point. There is a reason he’s campaigning on the slogan “Let’s be more normal.”
Alas for Cleverly, while “normal” may be selling points to the electorate, the people who get to pick the leader are Conservative party members, and they have rather different priorities. Their preference instead is for Kemi Badenoch, a woman who believes Britain’s maternity pay, among the lowest in Europe, is “excessive”, and that 10% of civil servants, many of whom would once have voted Tory, “should be in prison”. (The latter may have been a joke. The former, I suspect, was not.) Badenoch’s appeal to Tory members is not just her full-throated commitment to right-wing ideas, but her willingness to fight anyone who so much as asks her a question.
Badenoch, though, may have blown herself up (“There’s a bit of Liz about Kemi,” one colleague told the i). She seems unlikely to win over the extra moderate MPs required to make the top two, if only because she’s as difficult with her colleagues as she is with everybody else.
That means the most right-wing candidate to make it to the members, and thus the most likely victor, is almost certain to be Robert Jenrick. His campaign strategy, of appealing to his members’ worst prejudges while briefing that he’s the frontrunner, has been clear since at least the summer of 2023 when he ordered that murals of Disney characters on an asylum centre be painted over, as if the main pull factor attracting refugees to this island was the opportunity to see slightly wonky pictures of Goofy. His main achievements in the campaign’s closing days have been to claim we need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights because [checks notes] the SAS is killing people, and to announce his daughter’s middle name was “Thatcher”. Nobody would call Robert Jenrick normal.
Last and also least, there’s Tom Tugendhat. He was in the army. A mildly heartbreaking word cloud of public opinion put together by Savanta suggests surprisingly few people have noticed.
I do not, I admit, have the Tories’ best interests at heart: I would love them to be out of office for a very long time. But I’m aware, too, of the current volatility of the world economy and electorate alike, and just as Labour recently won a victory that seemed implausible back in 2019, we cannot entirely rule out a Tory revival by 2028.
It’s all very amusing, watching Kemi Badenoch pointlessly alienate another key demographic, or Robert Jenrick accidentally accuse British forces of atrocities. But whoever wins this race might, however unlikely it seems right now, genuinely end up as Prime Minister. As someone who writes about politics, I’m having a great time. As someone who lives in this country, I’m concerned.
