During the 2016 Conservative leadership election, I supported Theresa May, because I was happy to have Nick Timothy running the country. During the 2019 one, I supported Boris Johnson, because I believed him the more likely of the two final candidates to deliver Brexit. This new contest is proving a harder call.
That’s because we know less about most of the candidates. Whatever you think of my choices, May had been the longest-serving Home Secretary in modern times and a familiar figure near the top of government for the best part of a decade. Johnson was a celebrity and the subject of biographies. He had also served as Mayor of London (twice) and Foreign Secretary (briefly).
The most experienced of the eight candidates up before Conservative MPs today is Jeremy Hunt. If this site’s surveys are correct, he is also the least likely to win – even were Tory members to be offered his name, which they probably won’t be.
The former Health Secretary knows this perfectly well. I suspect that the real aim of this decent, thoughtful politician is to remind his colleagues and Party activists of his credentials for a return to Cabinet.
Liz Truss has been in Cabinet for the best part of ten years, but in posts sometimes remote from the public eye. She has been Environment Secretary, but most people don’t live in the countryside. She has been Justice Secretary, but most of us neither go to prison nor end up before the courts. She has been Trade Secretary, perhaps the Cabinet portfolio that the media covers least, and Foreign Secretary for not very long.
Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, has been in Parliament for seven years, and served at a senior level in only one department, the Treasury. If Truss’s wider views are known (social and economic liberalism), many of his are not.
For example, he is understood not be Net Zero’s biggest fan. But unlike the most forceful recent Chancellors, George Brown and George Osborne, he has been an old-style occupant of the Treasury, sticking to his portfolio. We know a lot about it and him because of Covid: furlough and the big bazooka; fiscal orthodoxy and tax rises. Then there is his Mais lecture.
But what would a Sunak adminstration do about Net Zero? Or about levelling up – a central aim of this Government, but one with which he hasn’t really engaged? Would a Sunak security and defence policy be Treasury-led?
We don’t know and haven’t yet been told. But the former Chancellor is a model of familiarity compared to most of the other candidates. We know his Covid record, his public style, how he leads his Treasury team, what he does with social media, how he comes over to voters – and about the skeleton in his cupboard with a Green Card from America strung around its neck.
For most of the rest, we don’t have a clue: how they would govern; whether they can lead a team; what they’d be like in a crisis; how their families would cope with the exposure; whether they could cope in Parliament; what sort of a figure they’d cut abroad – and, perhaps above all, how they would go down with voters, once the latter had got to know them.
Tom Tugendhat, the other candidate of the Party’s centre-left, has never even been a Minister. Again, I suspect that this able politician is playing leap-frog with in this election: that’s to say, using it as a means of vaulting himself into the Cabinet.
Suella Braverman is a Minister, but one whose job is usually neither to be seen nor heard. That’s the traditional flavour of the Attorney General, the post she holds. But this candidate of the Party’s centre-right has been a trailblazer in the office, speaking out more publicly than Attorney Generals usually do.
That Priti Patel dipped her toe in the contest’s water was a reminder that the right-of-centre bit of it is crowded, and that Braverman’s candidacy has not yet gained traction.
The same is as true of Nadhim Zahawi as it isn’t of Kemi Badenoch. And not only because the former Equalities Minister came second yesterday in our Next Tory Leader survey. Of all the candidates, Badenoch has most projected in this election a sense of being in it because she wants to say something rather than be someone. I don’t support any candidate yet, but would most like to see Badenoch in the next round, so that her capabilities and views can be more extensively tested.
That brings me finally to a candidate who seems well placed but is a bit of a mystery.
Penny Mordaunt’s launch video was a work of genius because it understood the market in which she must sell herself. Never mind that bits of it had later to be scrubbed. Or that it proclaimed a slogan that frustrates meaning, since leadership has no intrinsic connection with boats.
But in proclaiming that “our leadership needs to become a little less about the leader and a lot more about the ship”, Mordaunt was sending a message to the voters who at this stage matter most in this contest: the men and women of the Conservative Parliamentary Party.
It is: your present leader has ignored you. Your talents have been overlooked. I will look after you, and change the culture. That’s a message which her audience may well be willing to hear. Mordaunt is the second Tory woman in these contests to stand on the platform of a Listening Leadership. The first was Margaret Thatcher in 1975, and we know what happened next.
I’m not say that Mordaunt is like Thatcher in anything bar tactical nous. Indeed, I find it hard to get the hang of her at all.
The winner of our survey is a bit of an enigma. She has an outgoing naval persona, but seems to me a very private person, whose teenage years had family challanges. She appears to be a kind of populist, but takes some decidedly unpopulist positions, such as on trans.
She says she believes in “servant leadership”. “If we come together, listen to each other, take on the challenges and embrace the opportunities of our times to enable all that our party and nation has to offer, then there will be nothing we cannot do,” she wrote on this site in 2019, announcing a consultation to find out what voters think. If Mordaunt progresses in this contest, we will need to know more about Chris Lewis, one of her backers, who appears to be the force behind her ideas.
My instinct is that this form of politics is unworkable. Ask 60 million people what they want, and you’ll get 60 million different answers. At which point, you must choose between them – thus perhas disappointing a mass of those who placed faith in you.
However, I am a 62 year old Tory bloke, not a floating voter, and it may well be that my inability to see Mordaunt’s point is bound up with not beong a woman. There is evidence that women prefer collaboration to competition, and the nod to Jo Cox in Mordaunt’s launch video showed awareness of the point. The votes of women Tory MPs will be very important during the Parliamentary stage of the ballot.
Is Mordaunt actually the Amazing Mrs Pritchard, the woman with no previous political experience who becomes Prime Minister, and finds it harder going than she originally thought? Maybe, maybe not. With roughly half the Tory Parliamentary Party undeclared, this election could throw up anything, including a winner that we buy in haste and repent of at leisure.