The legend is that trying to organise Conservative MPs is like trying to herd cats, and so it is likely to prove with Nadhim Zahawi’s 25 votes in the Tory leadership contest. They are likely to fly all over the place.
But unpredictability goes only so far. The 18 votes of the left-of-Party centre Jeremy Hunt are unlikely to go to the right-of-Party-centre Suella Braverman. A slice of them will transfer to the other left-of-Party-centre candidate in the field, Tom Tugendhat.
By this evening, then, Braverman is the most likely of the six remaining candidates to be eliminated. That would leave Sunak, Mordaunt, Truss, Badenoch and Tugendhat squaring off over the weekend.
Tugendhat ought to run out of votes to squeeze sooner rather than later. For example, he isn’t well placed to get many from Braverman if she is eliminated.
Badenoch, in the meantime, must keep talking: making waves, winning admirers – and hoping that she can gain votes from Braverman, with whom she posed for a photo yesterday, and from Tugendhat. But her only hope now of getting into the final is if the position of one of the front three runners collapses to her benefit.
That is unlikely to happen. The margins between the candidates’ first round votes are often fine. But it is reasonable to expect the first three this morning to be the same tomorrow morning: Sunak, Mordaunt and Truss, in the same order.
It may be that the order of play is different – that Tugendhat or Badenoch drop out today, for example. But were you Truss, you would anticipate having to squeeze the bottom three for support next week, or to try to, as you hope to take out one of the present top two.
Truss will also calculate that unless Sunak’s vote somehow collapses altogther, it will be more profitable to target Mordaunt’s: after all, the latter seems to be drawing a greater share of her support from the Party’s centre-right than is Sunak, and this is the pool that Truss will find it easiest to fish in for votes.
Moreover, Mordaunt is about to discover the perils of being seen to be the front-runner. She may be 21 votes behind Sunak, but she is the day’s sensation: making headlines as the outsider most likely to win the contest, since both YouGov’s polling and this site’s survey are bullish about her prospects if she can make a final against Sunak.
So watch for Mordaunt’s character, record and views to now come under fire: to get a flavour of it, take a look at David Frost’s excoriating verdict. On the last, her association with the man who seems to be her main backer, Chris Lewis, will be probed extensively. His Lewis Advisory Board appears to be the main source of her ideas about “servant leadership”.
On the middle element, her record, expect the veracity of her claims about trans to be proved. For example, she says that she never supported changes to the Gender Recognition Act to de-medicalise self-identification. A Twitter thread from Ben Cohen, the Editor of Pink News, questions this claim in detail.
Returning to Mordaunt’s views, the campaigns of both Truss and Sunak are likely to target Mordaunt’s relative inexperience. Both will want to present themselves as more likely to manage the economic ship competently.
Truss will be targeting that message on MPs as she seeks to knock Mordaunt out. Sunak will begin to laser in on Party members, since our survey and YouGov’s poll agree that Mordaunt would defeat him in the run-off were it to be held today.
As I say, the margins between the candidates’ votes in yesterday’s first ballot were not emphatic, and it may be that one of the bottom three candidates, most likely Badenoch, can spring a surprise. But the most reasonable expectation now is of a Sunak-Mordaunt or Sunak-Truss final round.
Sunak versus Truss would represent business as usual (or the state of affairs closest to it in this pullulating leadership election). Truss holds a great office of state. So did Sunak until recently. Both are better plugged in to the Party’s establishment – its donors, networks of advisers and top volunteers – than is Mordaunt.
And on the basis of our survey and YouGov’s polling, either would currently defeat Sunak in the final. My sense is that both camps could more easily live both with each other in the final, and with the other candidate in Downing Street after the contest is over.
Much depends on how Mordaunt weathers the coming assault on her views, record and character. It may be that her campaign collapses under it. I would limit my betting on that prospect. Mordaunt is a forceful speaker, and ought to prosper during the coming TV debates, unless her grasp of detail collapses under fire.
Were I her, I would double down on presenting myself as the plucky outsider – the candidate most aware that Conservative MPs are sometimes treated shabbily by their leaders; the candidate whose profile is most like that of party activists – targeted by an out-of-touch Party establishment that is messing up its majority and bungling Brexit.
I might find this line of attack most profitable against Sunak. A ruthless campaign could unfairly caricature him as a tax-raising globalist, as much at home among Californian start-ups as his Yorkshire constituents, if not more. And contrast his smoothie flavour with Mordaunt’s Toryish own.
Now stand back for a moment from the prospect of this electoral Billingsgate, in which anonymous briefers throw buckets of ordure over other candidates – and Boris Johnson’s record, too; and that of the Government he still leads. How would this help anyone other than Keir Starmer?
What is the gain from dynamiting your opponent if you explode your own house with him – or her? Do any of the candidates really want their exhausted teams to stagger into Downing Street in September through a metaphorical landscape of smoke, ruin, and corpses? To inherit not a crown, but a wasteland?
I’m not currently supporting any candidate, though I would like to see Badenoch progress further. But I’m wary of the prospect of Conservative MPs voting for one of them and Party members then voting for another. It didn’t happen in 2005, 2017 or 2019: David Cameron and Johnson won among both constituencies. Theresa May never faced a member ballot.
But remember 2001 (if you are long enough in the tooth to do so). Ken Clarke topped the MPs ballot; Iain Duncan Smith the members’. The latter’s period as leader was cursed from the start by his lack of support in the Parliamentary Party, which cut him less and less slack as he faced more and more problems.
The parallel is far from exact. The Conservatives were in opposition, not government, when Duncan Smith was elected. And the Parliamentary vote divided fairly evenly between three candidates in the final round, not two – which further weakened his capacity to manage his colleagues, because he’d won only a third of their votes.
Nonetheless, I’m haunted by the prospect of Team Mordaunt potentially taking office with the party’s top team having eventually lined up behind Sunak: its networks of staff and Spads; its most senior Ministers; the remaining candidates in this contest – even (who knows?) the mercurial Johnson.
In David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence wins the race to Damascus. But his insurgent, desert army can’t manage its generators. The city burns. Disillusioned and directionless, the rebels leave. Perhaps I look ahead too far and calculate too much. After all, these are still early days, and so much is unknown.