The beauty parade of Conservative leadership hopefuls is finally approaching its end stages. Tory MPs have spent six weeks whittling down six candidates to two, who will now be put to a ballot of party members.
And they saved the biggest shock until last: James Cleverly, who led in the penultimate MP ballot and was the most moderate of the top three, dropped to last place in the final round, meaning it is the two candidates to his right – Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick – who members will decide between.
Cue glee on the Labour side: after a bruising first 100 days, they can barely believe their luck that it’s come down to a close fight between a man who ordered the removal of a cartoon mural designed for children at an asylum seeker reception, and a woman who appeared to say that maternity pay has gone too far then claimed she had been misrepresented. “It looks like Keir’s genie is back at work,” one cabinet minister privately told my Guardian colleagues. “Does the Tory leadership result need to be declared as a gift?” another Labour MP joked. Cleverly’s team have denied they tried to game the result of the members’ ballot by lending votes to their preferred opponent Jenrick in a way that backfired. But it seems likely that his supporters took it upon themselves to switch votes to knock out the candidate they thought posed the biggest risk.
There are aspects of this result for Labour to feel pleased about: there is that old maxim that in a two-party, first-past-the-post system, parties win from the centre. Both Jenrick and Badenoch suffer from poor approval ratings with the public; their net favourability ratings are -19 and -27 respectively, and significantly lower among the Labour and Lib Dem voters, some of which they would need to win over for an election victory. (Although Cleverly’s are little better at -19, and Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak score -36 and -42).
Both candidates are prone to damaging gaffes: Jenrick’s dangerous assertion that UK special forces were killing rather than capturing terrorists as a result of the European convention on human rights; and Badenoch’s joke that 5-10% of civil servants were so bad that they “should-be-in-prison”, for example.
The moderate Tory Reform Group of MPs has said it cannot endorse either candidate. Whoever wins will have secured the backing of only a third of MPs, which will make for fractious opposition politics.
But a little caution would be advised. Polling of Conservative members suggests the race is close, but that Badenoch is in the lead. It’s highly unlikely any leader could build the coalition needed to win the next election given how badly the party rates on competence. But there is a chance Badenoch could cause Labour more damage than a cursory read initially suggests.
First, she is not “dim-witted” as one Labour MP suggested last week; far from it. Her gaffes are more the product of a self-assuredness that needs to be kept in check because it means she shoots from the hip without thinking. When she performs at her best, she wipes the floor with her opponents, as she did at an equalities select committee hearing last December. Cleverly is safer, but duller; when the struggle in the first years of opposition is to get any airtime at all, Badenoch will have a better chance, although it could go either way.
A new report last week from Conservative thinktank Onward sets out how difficult it would be for the Tories to win the next election, but contains some surprising insights about the defectors who voted for the party in 2019 but not in 2024. Defectors to Lib Dem and Reform – more likely to say they would consider switching back than those that defected to Labour – say the most important thing the party could do to win them back is reduce immigration. A hardline approach to immigration might not be election-winning territory but it might help the Tories attract back a broader range of voters than one might initially assume.
Badenoch is clearly on the right when it comes to deregulation. But some of her policy positions are more nuanced than it first appears, and may allow her to hurt Starmer in a way that Cleverly couldn’t. Often depicted as a fervent culture warrior, it is very much true she enjoys combatively participating in debates, such as on the role of empire. But on the fraught issue of sex and gender, her position is not, in the main, out of step with the public and she may be able to embarrass Starmer, who has in the past shown bewildering levels of prevarication on whether biological sex matters when it comes to single-sex services, sports and spaces.
The problem with writing off all her views on identity as culture war irrelevance is that the left might not anticipate those occasions when what she says might actually resonate. That Badenoch has become such a cartoon villain is not simply a product of her gaffes or her outspokenness; it is also to do with the fact that there are those on the left who suffer from cognitive dissonance when it comes to rightwing politicians of colour, particularly women.
To be brown or black and rightwing is seen as a betrayal. So Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel are indistinguishably lumped together; they may all be on the right of the party, but there are important differences and the one-dimensional lens they are seen through feels linked to the fact none of them are white.
Diane Abbott also unquestionably gets a harder ride from her opponents than white male politicians. Not only might this lull Labour into over-complacency; if the Conservatives select the first black female party leader after having the first female leader and first minority ethnic leader, it should give the left serious pause for thought about its own diversity issues.
Ultimately, a Badenoch leadership could be an unmitigated disaster for the Tories but could also go better than her detractors assume. And if the former, it is relatively easy for the Conservative parliamentary party to oust her in favour of someone else before the next election. It’s always better to over, rather than underestimate your opponents; Labour may want to hold back on the elation for a little while yet.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
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• This article was amended on 13 October 2024. An earlier version referred to Robert Jenrick’s assertion that UK forces were “murdering rather than capturing terrorists” as a result of the European convention on human rights. The phrase he used was “killing rather than capturing terrorists”.
