Roll up for the “Dancing on Ice” tournament visiting Birmingham this week — a feast of flashy pirouettes, slippery falls, arguments about the scoreboard — and the odd Tonya Harding-style conspiracy over whispering campaigns and attacks on rivals.
The stars (it is all relative), are a quad of candidates for the gold medal, targeting two very different sets of judges: the MPs who will perform the cull next week down to the final duo voted on by members.
The leaderboard has shifted this week in the direction of Robert Jenrick, whom my spell check turns into “Rob Generic” and the spell check might have hit the nail on the head. A formerly bland Cameron appointee, Mr Generic turned fiery immigration hawk with a strong of backers on the hard Right. He has been many things in his political career — and never looks completely comfortable in any of them.
But ambition is a strong vector and Jenrick came Birmingham with the single aim of pushing Badenoch out of the role as favourite. So far, that has gone to plan: her unforced error in a muddled sentence which seemed to suggest maternity pay was too “excessive”, followed by a round of saying that she meant something else, allowed her main foe to ram home a clear message — that Euroscepticism needs a champion post Brexit and he is the chap for that.
He has, however, repeated an error which curtailed Michael Portillo’s chance of the becoming leader when he nabbed the SAS “Who dares, wins” motto as defence secretary in 1995, to showcase his own muscularity. Jenrick‘s claims that British special forces kill terrorists abroad (because onerous human rights laws prevent them being extradited for trial in Europe) is a distortion of a far more nuanced story — and a dangerous abuse of a sensitive matter. There are already enough questions around the deployment rules of special forces and unlawful exceptions, without deploying the SAS as a leadership bid stunt. His merch is a baseball cap that says “Bobby J” on it — which looks like a Trump tribute — and on the basis of this blowhard intervention, you can see why.
Tony Blair told me this week that the Conservatives had “got ideology, big time”
Yet while foot-in-mouth syndrome has been spreading through the Tory pastures, Jenrick’s polling among members and MPs have seen him catch up with Kemi Badenoch. So, her closing pitch aims to move on from a “Kemi-kaze” moment over a clumsy phrasing on maternity pay. An evening event today is intended to establish her more serious economic bona-fides that “generic-Jenrick”, who has little to say on a plan for growth to challenge Labour.
Badenoch has penned a 20,000-word essay on what ails Britain. Her hurdle however is not to show off more intellectual prowess, but to demonstrate that she can offer hope and inspiration as well than a series of heated rhetorical propositions.
The appeal of James Cleverly is his sheer affability: strolling around in a pair of shades, happy to grab a glass of wine and natter with hacks, rather than berating them.
The problem with being the ”unity candidate” however is that it lacks a diagnosis: it sounds a bit like a therapist telling an unhappy family that the reason they are miserable is that they keep fighting. But Cleverly is the candidate with some headroom left: he did, after all, work his way to the top of Cabinet under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, so there is steel under the “softy tendency” exterior.
That leaves Tom Tugendhat, whose campaign is on the sidelines of the “One Nation” corner (which is really now a place where they keep unrepentant Remainers). Even a quick segue towards being “prepared” to leave the ECHR (a behemoth subject for the party) does not look like putting the tiger back in the Tom tank. There’s a touch of the Lib Dem’s Ed Davey’s campaign larkiness in the merchandising of fake tan and tattoos (happily these are temporary, lest they end up damaging the career outlook of any young Tory daft enough to get one) — but even that feels like a sign that this push is more about positioning than chance of victory.
In an interview with Tony Blair this week, the former PM told me that the Conservatives had “got ideology, big time” — and preferred indulging this preoccupation figuring out what people most wanted them to deliver. That’s not just a view from the other side of the aisle. When members and MPs leave the Birmingham gathering, they will hit the cold hard reminder back in their localities and constituencies that their doctrinal differences are unheeded by most of the voters and that so many things they have spent the week doing or not doing are no longer their prerogative.
A long leadership race has been spent fighting old battles and creating some new ones. Whoever enters the final and mounts the podium, it’s a troupe dancing on very thin ice indeed.
