When I read people referring to the competition to be the next leader of the Tory party as “a beauty contest”, I reach for my red pen. It has more in common with Squid Game, the dystopian survival thriller. With the difference that the winner of this marathon elimination contest will not take home a large sum of money. The prize is to lead – I ought to say try to lead – a Conservative parliamentary group smaller in size than at any time in the long history of the party.
The 121 Tory MPs will this week winnow the field of leadership candidates down from the current four to the two whose names will then be put to the party’s wizened membership. It’s been more than three months since this interminably long contest was announced. Time enough surely for Conservative parliamentarians to come to a view about the wannabe leaders. Yet, canvassing opinion among Tory MPs about who they intend to back, I find a remarkably large proportion of them replying “I don’t know”. And not because they are keeping their preference secret, but because they are genuinely uncertain at this late stage. They often have a fierce conviction about which candidate would be a disaster for their party, but there’s much less confidence that any of the contenders has the potential to be an electoral success.
The rationale for holding such a protracted contest was to try to replicate what happened in 2005. David Cameron, then relatively unknown, stole past more established rivals to become leader because he was fluent, fresh and seemed to offer the most persuasive project for taking the Tories back into power. That he did five years later, albeit short of a majority.
History is not repeating itself. A former cabinet minister who backed the idea of a prolonged contest groaned to me that he was beginning to regret it: “There’s no David Cameron. There’s no person everyone is pointing at and saying: ‘That’s the one!’ ”
If there’s a star among the four remaining contestants, they are keeping it well disguised. None of them has been impressive enough to sweep into a commanding lead. Robert Jenrick, the shape-shifting one-time Cameron fanboy turned poster child for the hard right, looks to have the best organised of the campaigns. It is definitely the most strutting. He swaggered about the party conference in Birmingham with a large posse of adolescent understrappers. The most shameless about striking Faragesque postures, he’s unembarrassed to declare his admiration for Donald Trump. There was something very Trumpian about his reckless and unevidenced claim that British special forces are “killing rather than capturing terrorists” because of European human rights law. He also carries baggage from his time in government that smells of fish. Some of his supporters seem to be hinting that he is leaning right to win the leadership contest and will tilt back towards the centre once he’s bagged it. If the zigzag is his intended strategy, there’s a snag. His backing band includes a lot of the loons who once orbited Suella Braverman. These headbangers are not the kind of people who will forgive him for treating them as useful idiots by trying to execute a cynical reverse ferret. “The Suella gang have got him by the balls,” says one veteran of past leadership campaigns. “If he tries to tack to the centre, they’ll say we’ll destroy you.”
The central case made for Kemi Badenoch by her cheerleaders is that she is “exciting”, by which they mean they think she has a bit of charisma and a gob that can grab the attention of the media. One of her flaws is to think that any publicity is good publicity. She spent much of her time in Birmingham having to explain away remarks that seemed to suggest she thought maternity pay was too generous. When you are explaining, you are losing. She then claimed that “about 5-10%” of the civil service are “should-be-in-prison bad”. Perhaps she was joking. Perhaps she meant it. I couldn’t tell. Perhaps she doesn’t know herself. One member of the shadow cabinet remarks: “The thing about Kemi is we know she’s Mrs T. The question is whether she is Mrs Thatcher or Mrs Truss.”
Tom Tugendhat, the standard bearer of the one-nation tradition, is a former military man, though he prefers to keep that hush-hush. He’s a serious guy and by most accounts also a nice one, both of which may be more handicap than advantage in a Conservative leadership race. A low-octane speech to the conference lacked oratorical oomph. He can also appear to be rather thin-skinned for a job that requires the possession of a rhino-like hide. Most Tories assume he will be first to be knocked out in the voting this week.
For my money, James Cleverly added momentum in Birmingham. He avoided any obvious gaffes, a surprise on the upside given his past record of filling his mouth with his feet. He was the only contender to offer any kind of apology for what the Conservatives inflicted on the country in the run-up to their eviction. At a question-and-answer session, he had a good line about his ancestry: “My mum’s family came here from Sierra Leone in west Africa in 1966 and my dad’s family came here from northern France in 1066.” His 20-minute pitch to the party on the final day was the most rapturously received of the four. He got a laugh from the more self-aware members of the audience when he told the Tory party it needs to be “more normal”. Can someone who was foreign secretary and home secretary during the ignominious fag end of the Tory years be the person to convince voters to forgive them their multiple sins? The other question asked about him is whether he has an actual plan to rescue his party or simply reckons that being cheerily blokeish will be enough. They do like to bitch about one another, do Tories. Someone who worked with him in government quips: “The name Cleverly is a violation of advertising standards.” Then again, the same Tory MP also mused to me: “I could end up voting for him.”
This uncertainty about who to choose reflects confusions and contradictions in the Conservative psyche. One of the cases for taking their time before picking a new chief was to make space for a comprehensive postmortem into the worst defeat in the party’s history. Psephologists and other analysts have done some illuminating work on what inspired so many voters to loathe the Tories with such intensity. Answer: just about everything. The more serious-minded Conservative commentators recognise that the party has been in the throes of an identity crisis since the Brexit referendum eight years ago. To which I’d add, it has also suffered from an integrity crisis and a competency crisis.
Yet there has been scant soul-searching. They can largely agree that being hideously and visibly divided didn’t do much for their electoral chances, but the debate hasn’t got much deeper than that. Those capable of self-criticism at the conference were heavily outnumbered by those in the grip of self-delusion. Rather than confront any of the ugly truths about their party, speakers sought and secured applause by trotting out familiar Tory tropes: slash immigration, cut taxes, bring back grammar schools. No one was brave enough to tell the Tory party how it looks to the vast majority of the electorate. There was no equivalent of the reality-confronting “nasty party” speech made by Theresa May in 2002.
They talked a lot about the votes and five seats shed to Nigel Farage’s Reform. Encouragingly for Sir Ed Davey, they appeared much less interested in why they lost support and 59 seats to the Lib Dems. They much preferred to take pleasure in the early squalls besetting Sir Keir Starmer’s government than asking why the Tories were swept away by an electoral tsunami.
You were barely aware they’d just gone down to a landslide defeat within the Tory conference bubble, such was its weirdly upbeat vibe. One of the new MPs, an astute head on youngish shoulders, put it down to collective denial: “We haven’t come to terms with how bad the defeat was and we haven’t come to terms with how irrelevant we are going to be.”
Lurking in the back of the minds of many Conservative MPs who will be voting this week is the thought that they could soon be doing it all over again. Of the next leader, one shrewd Tory remarked: “If they fuck up, they’ll be out. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s another leadership election in two years’ time.” There’s no such thing as a final season for the Tory Squid Game.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
