Thoughts On The Tory Leadership Candidates

Cleverly Just Makes Sense, Badenoch is the Tory Corbyn

The week begins as the Tory leadership race hurtles towards its conclusion. Although perhaps “hurtles” is the wrong word. It’s more like a gentle jog in a “Hamas are terrorists” jumper. On the 9th and 10th of October, Tory MPs will cut half the remaining candidates and choose two for the party membership to consider. With a few days now passed since the mixed bag of Tory conference speeches, the dust has settled, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the state of the race.

I’ve ordered the candidates from worst to best, considering what I think would be best for the party, what I personally want to happen, and the broader political landscape. As a centre-right kind of guy, I think my take on the candidates basically reflects what would be good for the party. But as we know, who the Conservatives should pick as leader and who they will pick are often questions with very different answers.

Kemi Badenoch: The Members’ Favourite

Key Policies:

• Focus on increasing productivity

• Reducing regulations on businesses

• Stricter approach to immigration

Badenoch leads in most polls of party members, narrowly ahead of Robert Jenrick. But her combative style is a dealbreaker. Framing herself as a hard-truth teller, Badenoch appears outraged at even mild questioning during interviews. It’s important to remember that, whilst journalists might not be the most popular people in the country, their questions are often a proxy for the concerns of the wider electorate. Badenoch comes across like she doesn’t care what anybody else thinks. Worse still, this is reflected in her attitude towards her colleagues, going out of her way to pick fights even with people she is politically close to.

This would matter much less if she had an ideological comfort zone broadly aligned with the average voter or if she had the right diagnosis of why the Conservatives lost the last election so badly. Badenoch has neither. Many have said that her comments on maternity pay being too high or 10% of civil servants deserving to be in prison were gigantic gaffes. But that doesn’t give Badenoch enough credit—she actually believes those things. They’re not mistakes; they’re indicative of her leadership style—no longer telling people what they want to hear and instead telling them what Kemi Badenoch wants them to hear.

All of this goes down very well with members, and Badenoch has a small lead over the other candidates in polls of the party faithful. But if I were Labour or the Liberal Democrats, I would be rubbing my hands with glee at the prospect of her leading the party. She’s a Tory Jeremy Corbyn, harking back to a non-existent point in the Conservative party’s past when it was truly “conservative” enough.

In Badenoch’s worldview, it’s always somebody else’s fault—the woke civil service, Blair’s constitutional reforms, Brown’s Treasury rules. But none of those things doomed the Tories. The party lost the last election because it failed to grow the economy or its pool of potential voters. Instead, it spent its time in office pandering to ageing homeowners at the expense of everybody else. Still, unlike the other frontrunner, at least Badenoch has some principles.

Robert Jenrick: The Shape-Shifting Opportunist

Key Policies:

• Substantial halt in net migration

• Reforming the structure of the Conservative Party

• Strong stance on sovereignty, including a British Bill of Rights

Robert Jenrick was born to play an ethically compromised Prime Minister in a BBC children’s drama. His ability to reinvent himself politically stretches the word “inauthentic” to breaking point. A Cameroon who became a die-hard Boris Johnson supporter before hitching himself to the Sunak bandwagon, then ditching the beleaguered former PM for being too soft on immigration. And whilst you can get away with being a political chameleon when all you’ve done is serve in a string of B-list ministerial posts, if you want the top job, there’s nowhere to hide. He’s topped both the MPs’ ballots so far and plays well with the members, but he would be only slightly less disastrous than Badenoch if elected.

Jenrick has based his candidacy around cutting immigration as a means of representing the socially conservative right of the Tory party. He wants to leave the ECHR, scrap the Human Rights Act, and move towards “net-zero” migration. To Jenrick, the problems Britain is facing with economic growth, housing, education, and social cohesion are a result of our migration policies. He may have a point to an extent, but the migration theory of everything has limits, and it’s unclear if Jenrick actually has anything else to say.

Winning back Reform voters concerned about migration will be an important challenge for the next party leader, but it won’t be the only one. The party can only return to power if it also appeals in the huge number of seats it lost to the Lib Dems last July. Perhaps Jenrick’s biggest issue is that he comes across as a bit of a try-hard weirdo, trying to start a British MAGA movement without the charisma. Whether it’s saying that he wants Trump to win in November or that he wants to move the UK’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Jenrick is the epitome of a man who spends too much time on right-wing Twitter and not enough in the real world.

Tom Tugendhat: Principled but Underpowered

Key Policies:

• Conservative revolution for a higher wage, lower migration economy

• Focus on service and duty

• Strengthening public services

Tom Tugendhat seems like a nice guy. But that, in itself, is a damning indictment of how his campaign for leader has gone so far. He stands out as perhaps the most principled candidate in the race, but he’s too similar to Keir Starmer in terms of his approach. Whilst his focus on service and duty might appeal to lapsed One Nation Tories in the Home Counties, it won’t wash with the socially conservative voters who plumped for Reform at the last election.

Tugendhat has tried to sound angry with the incumbent government, he’s tried to ditch the nice-guy One Nation image by saying he’d be willing to leave the ECHR, but it comes across like he doesn’t really believe himself. Which is something of a shame, because he has a great background. He served in the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been a leading voice on the threat posed by China and Russia, and was prepared to call out Boris Johnson’s nonsense from the backbenches rather than toady up and serve in government.

The former security minister needed his conference speech to be perfect, and it was merely passable. He hit the right notes to make the next shadow cabinet but not to lead the democratic world’s oldest and most successful political party. His tame effort hit the right notes on cutting taxes and migration, but the limp delivery will have done little to quell concerns he isn’t strong enough to take on Starmer across the despatch box. He’ll get knocked out on Tuesday and keep his powder dry to back one of the final two.

James Cleverly: The Let’s Make It Morning In Britain Again Candidate

Key Policies:

• “One in, two out” regulatory approach

• Increase defence spending

• Focus on building more homes and infrastructure

I hate to go all hyperbolic, but if the Conservative party has a future—heck, if the centre-right has much of a future—then it should pick James Cleverly to be leader. His conference speech was a barnstormer, managing to enthuse the hall with his talk of deregulation and jacking up defence spending whilst also sounding like someone an aspirational voter of any stripe might want to support. He managed a sort of mea culpa for the Tories’ failings in office, saying the party needed to be less “weird” and more optimistic—right on both counts. But he also didn’t make the mistake Labour made in 2010 of completely jettisoning their record in government. Cleverly deftly manages to sound like he gets why they lost without saying their time in power was a complete waste.

“Cleverly’s vision is the correct one for a centre-right party trying to win an election in Britain: low taxes, a better state not a bigger state, and crucially, getting stuff built!”

Cleverly brings far more experience than any of the other candidates in the race, serving in a variety of ministerial posts, including two great offices of state under four Prime Ministers. Anybody who comes out of the Home Office with their reputation intact is somebody worth watching. He’s also an excellent public speaker whom you can imagine dismantling Starmer in the Commons. And his vision is the correct one for a centre-right party trying to win an election in Britain: low taxes, a better state not a bigger state, and crucially, getting stuff built! Having a YIMBY as Leader of the Opposition and a YIMBY in Number 10 would be a clear win for those who care about Britain becoming a first-world country again. And you know what else? He’s the most popular with the country at large too.

None of which is to say that he’s perfect. Far from it. He’s got the baggage of serving under Johnson and Truss, and backing the former’s ill-fated second bid for the leadership. His wealth of experience in ministerial office is also a double-edged sword—he can be criticised on his record more than the other three, as has happened over the Chagos Islands deal in the last week. He also has a penchant for a misjudged remark; whether it’s calling Stockton-on-Tees a “shithole” or joking about rohypnol, he’ll need to keep himself in check if he’s to avoid a PR disaster.

But Who Will Win?

Maybe this will look very foolish in a week’s time, but I think Jenrick and Cleverly will be the two who go to the party members. I’ve already said that Tugendhat failed the conference test, but Badenoch failed in her own way too. She’s consistently been second in the first two rounds of voting, but a bunch of MPs who backed Mel Stride will have to find a new candidate to back in Round 3, and then (assuming he’s the next to go) Tugendhat’s support will also get redistributed. Are those MPs really going to Kemi? She needed to show that she can play nicely with others, and instead she spent conference doing the exact opposite—freestyling a series of controversial and unpopular policy proposals.

When you couple this with how well Cleverly came out of Birmingham last week, it’s hard to see him missing the final two. Jenrick, meanwhile, may be a toadying career politician, but he manages to do just enough to stay the right side of the mainstream; he’s somebody the right of the party can support without being kept up at night and will certainly end up on the members’ ballot. Whether the final race is Jenrick vs Cleverly or Jenrick vs Badenoch, the final race will be close. Those of us without a say will just have to hope the Tories stick to their track record of choosing leaders wisely… oh wait.

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