If you’re reading this newsletter after 6pm, I’m afraid it’s too late. Unless you’ve secured 20 nominations from your fellow Conservative MPs, you won’t be making it onto the first ballot. Perhaps you’ll get a sympathy cabinet role.
At the time of writing, three (3pm update: four) candidates have passed that threshold: Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat and most recently, Liz Truss.
So, is the Tory right beginning to get it together? One sign that may be the case was the announcement this afternoon that the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, will not be standing. She is said to be considering backing Truss, who has just secured her 20.
The obvious question at this point must be, is this Sunak’s to lose? He leads on nominations, just received endorsements from Grant Shapps and Dominic Raab and may even be far enough ahead in later rounds that he can instruct some of his supporters to back the rival candidate he deems more likely to beat in the final two.
(There are suspicions that, back in 2019, Boris Johnson was not exactly devastated to be facing Remain-supporting Jeremy Hunt in the membership round rather than long-time frenemy and fellow Vote Leave pin-up, Michael Gove.)
But Sunak cannot be sure of victory. For starters, his lead amongst MPs, while large, is not as great as that of Johnson’s in 2019. Sunak is also playing the role of Tory Party prefect. The sensible, won’t just tell the faithful what they want to hear candidate.
While everyone else is promising tax cuts yesterday, Sunak reiterated in his launch today that he will only do so when economic conditions allow. This, apparently, makes the former chancellor a bit ideologically suspect. Though, as Kate Andrew points out in the Spectator, since when was costing your tax cuts a totemically left-wing position?
Sunak campaigned enthusiastically for Leave during the referendum, supported Boris Johnson in the 2019 leadership election and appeared uncomfortable with much of the economic support he doled out during the pandemic. A darling of the Tory left he is not.
If Sunak ends up being the moderate candidate, then that is simply further evidence of the hollowing out of the One Nation caucus of liberal Conservatives. If nothing else, it reminds me of what happened to the Labour right in the years following the 2010 general election.
In the subsequent leadership contest, the candidate of the right was none other than the foreign secretary, David Miliband. He won the membership but lost the electoral college (RIP) by 50.7% to 49.3%. Five years on, the Labour right’s standard-bearer was the shadow care minister, who achieved 5 per cent of the vote.
Perhaps the Tory right will get it together, and Liz Truss will reach the final two before wowing the 100,000 or so party members with her Damascene conversion to Brexit and supply-side economics (here she is in 2016 saying leaving the EU would be a disaster).
But even if they don’t, and the membership ultimately has to choose between Sunak and Mordaunt (backgrounder on her if you want), that is, shall we say, hardly a sign of success for the One Nation caucus either.
In the comment pages, after Sir Mo Farah revealed he was trafficked to the UK as a child, Nimco Ali, a child refugee from Somalia, says she knows his agony all too well. While Ryan Shorthouse, director of the Bright Blue think tank, says the Tory leadership contenders need to do more than talk about tax cuts.
And finally, the gospel of #bodypositivity is powerful but, Clementine Prendergast wonders, are you a bad feminist if you still dream of having a pert bum and cinched in waist?
