Conservatives have suggested that the former home secretary Suella Braverman is losing support as a potential party leader, as some who lost votes across southern England privately urged colleagues to resist a lurch to the right.
A number of MPs now see Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel and Kemi Badenoch, all of whom have ruled out a deal with the hard-right Reform leader Nigel Farage, as more viable candidates.
The Conservative party board is expected to meet on Monday to begin to draw up plans for a leadership contest to replace Rishi Sunak after the Tories’ devastating general election defeat.
Some party grandees have been pushing for a longer leadership contest, but no decision will be made on the timeline until a meeting of the backbench 1922 Committee of remaining Tory MPs.
Those who have spoken to Sunak describe him as shellshocked by the election result, the Guardian has been told. He has been calling all former Conservative MPs who lost their seats over the weekend, engaging in personal conversations of sometimes more than 10 minutes.
Three potential leadership candidates appeared to discuss the postmortem in the Sunday papers and TV shows: Braverman, Jenrick, the former immigration minister, and Victoria Atkins, the former health secretary.
Strategists for a number of candidates are analysing the records of the 121 remaining MPs. “It’s not a Faragist party,” said one. “Anyone who pursues that will lose.”
Another senior Tory said: “It must be more than banging on about immigration. Labour’s weak spot is delivering on their promise of growth. That is going to become a big debate in British politics.”
One former MP said: “There are no more Conservative MPs in Oxfordshire. That is not because we were not similar enough to Nigel Farage. It is because we were incompetent.”
The former justice secretary Robert Buckland, who lost his seat on Friday, warned the party not to flirt with Reform. “Letting in Farage is like letting a fox into the henhouse. He is a French poujadiste, not a British Conservative,” he said.
Some MPs and senior party figures said they believed Braverman was losing support among the remaining MPs in the party to Jenrick. She is the only potential candidate so far who has suggested an accommodation with Farage.
“I don’t think the Suella campaign is going to get off the ground and there is also a significant ‘stop Kemi’ campaign,” said one senior Tory. “Electing either of them is a recipe for more internal warfare.”
The Daily Telegraph reported on Sunday evening that Danny Kruger, a Braverman ally who is the co-chair of the rightwing New Conservatives caucus, would back Jenrick for the leadership.
Jenrick is said to have been making calls to sound out support. Patel, Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat are also seriously considering leadership bids. Patel, also a former home secretary, and Tugendhat are understood to believe they can reach across the party and appeal to both those who were denied their seats by Reform and those who were run close by the Liberal Democrats.
One MP said there was a growing view among colleagues that no one associated with Sunak’s leadership could lead the party. “Consensus is that we don’t want to jump in to a race dominated by those who also bore responsibility in government, which was all of them,” they said.
The candidates are expected to conduct a private courting of support before declaring. “There’s no advantage in declaring first,” one key supporter of one candidate said. “The party is still very traumatised and if you declare first you risk a backlash.”
The party is divided over whether to aim to have a new leader in place by the time of the Conservative party conference or at the latest by the autumn budget.
“I think most of us don’t want to rush this,” one MP said. “We need time to reflect and understand. After all Labour didn’t win this election. On 34%, their percentage was overstated by the pollsters hugely. The real story is the chaos and anger on the right of politics.”
Jenrick, speaking on the the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, said he believed that delivery – especially on immigration – was key to the party’s loss. “We did not deliver the level of growth and taxation that Conservatives expect, the quality of service in the NHS that the public need, and above all the secure borders and controlled, reduced migration that we promised and which we need to deliver,” he said.
Atkins, a Sunak ally, said there was still potential for the Conservatives to regain strength quickly. “I do observe that the support for the Labour party in this election has spread very thinly, a little bit like margarine,” she said, adding that she believed the country was “instinctively Conservative”.
In a piece for the Daily Telegraph, Braverman said the party had to vow to “leave the ECHR, scrap the Human Rights Act and fix Labour’s Equality Act”.
She said there was “already complacency” about why the party had lost. “We Tories need to face facts: we failed in office and deserved this result. Any analysis of the worst general election in our history that doesn’t start there is self-comforting or self-serving.”
MPs will meet when parliament returns next week for a 1922 Committee meeting chaired by Geoffrey Clifton-Brown after the former longtime chair Sir Graham Brady did not stand at the election. Some former MPs who were understood to have been interested in replacing him have lost their seats and MPs said the contest for that role was now wide open.
MPs have issued strong warnings internally about rumours that members could be cut out of a vote in leadership contest, saying it would drive hundreds of councillors and activists to defect to Reform.
“We are finished as a party if we don’t involve members, huge numbers of our councillors will defect. It’s a suicide mission,” one said. “The one thing Reform don’t have are people experienced with elections, agents, they can’t do campaigning locally effectively. We do not want to hand them our people by giving them a reason to defect.”
