The long Conservative leadership contest is at last in the final straight. On Saturday, we’ll find out whether Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick is going to shoulder the extraordinary challenge of rebuilding the party from one of its most shattering election defeats.
While the contest has been running since August, it feels as though we’ve had barely any time to really focus on this final choice. The 1922 Committee allocated only three weeks between the final round of MP voting and the close of polls for the membership vote – and with ballots arriving a week into that period, the real campaign was probably even shorter.
This was almost certainly deliberate. One of the party’s priorities has been avoiding a repeat of 2022, when Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss spent weeks taking lumps out of each other. Keeping multiple candidates in the race as long as possible made it easier for them to stay positive. But however understandable these decisions were from a party management perspective, they have come at an obvious cost to the democratic process.
It would have made far more sense, for example, for MPs to get their voting out of the way before the party conference; not just because MPs have presumably had plenty of opportunities to get to know the candidates already, but to avoid the very thing that actually happened: members warming up to a particular hopeful in Birmingham (James Cleverly), only for MPs to take them off the ballot paper anyway. Regardless, we are where we are. But where is that?
At the start of the contest, it looked as if Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat were in a sub-contest for the One Nation place in the final, while Badenoch and Jenrick were in a similar contest for the rightwing opening.
Now it’s just the two of them, this simple frame conceals as much as it reveals. One of the two has set out much more clearly a rightwing stall than the other – and it isn’t Badenoch the Brexiter but Jenrick, the reformed Cameroon. This isn’t because he has set out a markedly more rightwing programme than hers, but because he has actually set out a programme, while she has not.
Immigration is the most obvious cleavage. People can agree or disagree with Jenrick’s proposals for controlling the border, because he has said what he would do. Badenoch, on the other hand, has simply promised a grand review of all areas of policy … after she becomes leader. As a result, her coalition encompasses a tranche of the Tory right as well as nearly all of the Tory left; grandees such as William Hague have praised her focus on “principles rather than policies”.
A golden rule of politics, however, is that the value of a statement is measured by how much reasonable people can disagree with it. The Tory party has no difficulty espousing its nominal principles; it continued to do so until the moment it lost power. But there was a growing gulf between the Conservatives’ words and their deeds. Badenoch herself has said the party “talked right, but governed left”. That’s a fine description of a symptom, but it falls short of a diagnosis; we’ve heard nothing about why this was, or what “governing right” would look like under a Badenoch premiership.
The lack of specificity doesn’t seem to be hurting her among the membership: our final ConservativeHome survey had Badenoch leading Jenrick by 55% to 31%. But avoiding the detail does (as Labour is now learning in government) store up trouble for later. If Jenrick wins, he will have been frank with MPs and members about what he thinks needs to change, and will have a mandate to pursue his sometimes-radical changes in policy direction. Badenoch will not, either in detail or even in the abstract, for she has explicitly promised to “lead by consensus”.
What consensus? There is no agreement within the party about why its recent spell in government ended so disastrously; nor was there much agreement before the election about what it should actually do with power, which is why Sunak ended up not doing much of anything.
That division has been an undercurrent throughout the current leadership contest: some One Nation MPs were spooked by Jenrick’s early adoption of Suella Braverman’s unsuccessful campaign while rightwingers were wary of Badenoch’s record on questions such as tax and immigration.
Either candidate’s success as leader will hinge on whether they can find a way to overcome that division. But that doesn’t mean keeping everyone on side by sticking to broad platitudes and waiting for the party in government to fail. That’s what Labour did, and now it is paying the price – the exact same price the Tories will pay if they somehow regain office by such lazy means.
No, to succeed the party’s next leader is going to have to force an honest and painful reckoning. That means facing up to the gulf between the way the party governed and its professed values and, eventually and unavoidably, spelling out how it would govern differently next time.
On every major policy, making a firm decision is going to anger and alienate parts of the party. A leader who can’t win those battles is not prepared to lead; a leader who would prefer to avoid them is not prepared even to try.