Far from licking our lips at the prospect of a leadership election, ConservativeHome hasn’t asked this question for over six months.
When we did, Liz Truss led Rishi Sunak by 20 votes – 181 to 161; 23 per cent to 20 per cent.
Since then, the Chancellor has been engulfed by the controversy about his wife’s former non-dom status and his previous possession of a U.S green card.
He is now ninth in the table on five per cent.
Ben Wallace, who wasn’t even named in the December question, comes top in this survey. He has 119 votes and is on 16 per cent.
Penny Mordaunt is second by only a sliver. She has 117 votes and is on the same percentage.
The Defence Secretary has topped our Cabinet League Table since February, so that he also leads our Next Leader Survey is perhaps unsurprising.
Mordaunt’s second place, above seven Cabinet members, is more startling.
It’s very hard for a non-Cabinet Minister to gain the profile of a Cabinet Minister – or of a prominent backbencher either, who will be free to say what he thinks.
But the Trade Minister is somehow managing a bit of both.
She makes no pretence of having backed Boris Johnson in the recent leadership ballot, operates in the Government as a semi-independent, and has a way of pushing populist buttons – on tax cuts, for example.
The Prime Minister may not be in a strong enough position to fire her, and either way she is making hay while the sun shines.
Truss is third with 14 per cent. It may be that the association of the top Cabinet members with Johnson is tarnishing their brand among some members of the panel.
On the other hand, 39 panel members have refused to answer the question.
This is a higher refusenik total than elsewhere in the survey, and these will be the Prime Ministerial loyalists – believing that there is no vacancy and that the question is premature.
However, well over 700 take a different view, and that speaks for itself.
No potential leadership candidate other than our top three gets into double figures percentage-wise. And obviously, if no candidate can amass more than 16 per cent, then the next Conservative leadership election looks currently wide open.
Which is why tomorrow we will publish play-off results.
We will put the top MPs named, and others, up against each other – and see what happens when the panel is offered a choice, and cannot instead support a third party.