🇬🇧 Clambering up the greasy pole

🗳 Ambitious Tories are spending the weekend wooing the hinterlands and knifing each other in the back. John Oxley returns to handicap the leadership contest after the first two rounds of voting.

By John Oxley

We’re four days in and three candidates out in the race to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Though the voting is paused for the weekend, the candidates aren’t. They have a full schedule of hustings and three televised debates, and there’s a whole heap of backroom deals to be made. Next week, the final ballots of MPs will take place, with the five hopefuls still in the contest whittled down to the two who will face the public.

With two rounds of voting behind us, we now have some insight into how the candidates are positioning themselves and how the MPs are lining up behind them. We might not know who will win the contest, but we can start to see how it will be won.

First Round

Rishi Sunak—88

Penny Morduant—67

Liz Truss—50

Kemi Badenoch—40

Tom Tugendhat—37

Suella Braverman—32

Nadhim Zahawi—25 (ELIMINATED)

Jeremy Hunt—18 (ELIMINATED)

The first ballot largely went as expected. Sunak clinched first place, but not by an unassailable margin, which will be disappointing for his campaign. Widely deemed less popular with the rank-and-file members, he’ll want to demonstrate he has the full support of the parliamentary party when it goes to the members’ vote.

Liz Truss will also have been disappointed with this result. Running from the right of the party and boasting her Brexit credentials (despite originally voting Remain, she had a Damascene conversion in 2016), she was undermined by Badenoch and Braverman, who have leaned into conservative cultural talking points—positioning themselves as anti-woke and trying to focus the debate on their gender-critical credentials. Both will have been pleased to make it to this round, with Badenoch’s showing especially strong.

With the right split, there was room for Penny Morduant, whose campaign has tried to paint her as the sensible centrist. He tagline is a somewhat clunky “Leadership should be less about the leader, and more about the ship,” which plays up her constituency’s naval links and her own time the Royal Navy Reserves. She’ll be hoping that the right-wing block doesn’t coalesce around one of her rivals.

Tom Tugendhat made it through to the second round in her wake. He continues to emphasize his military background and his absence from Boris’s government. He promises a clean start, but may be hampered by the perception that he’s been soft on Brexit, and his seriousness has been conflated with arrogance. One Party insider tells me, “The problem with Tom’s campaign is, too many other MPs think he’s a dick.”

It wasn’t much of a surprise who was eliminated. Hunt was unable to build the support he mustered when he ran against Boris, and his new campaign felt lackluster by comparison. He crashed out at the bottom of the ballot. Nadhim Zahawi likewise struggled to establish his brand and fell below the thirty-vote cut off.

Second Round

Rishi Sunak—101

Penny Morduant—83

Liz Truss—64

Kemi Badenoch—49

Tom Tugendhat—32

Suella Braverman—27 (ELIMINATED)

The second round is where things start to get interesting.