Today should see Rishi Sunak through to the membership stage of this Conservative leadership – though one never quite knows. He will face one of two very different contests in that event.
His first and least likely opponent is Penny Mordaunt. Conventional wisdom has it that the votes of Kemi Badenoch, one of the two remaining right-of-party-centre candidates in the ballot yesterday morning, will mostly transfer to the now sole remaining right-of-party-centre candidate, Liz Truss. But Mordaunt is six votes ahead of Truss and one cannot be sure.
A Sunak-Mordaunt final would leave the right of the Party feeling that it had no candidate in the final ballot. I don’t think this has happened before under the current leadership election system. The right has always had someone to carry its banner, whether in Government or Opposition, and whether its candidate was victorious nor not: think Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Andrea Leadsom, Boris Johnson.
So I suspect that a Sunak-Mordaunt contest would be met by disillusion among some party activists – combined with rage among those elements who believe that Johnson should never have been ousted from office.
Talking of which, our first special Next Tory Leader survey, sent out at the beginning of the month, asked the panel whether it would have supported Johnson had he attempted to stay on as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister. Sixty per cent said no and 36 per cent said yes.
Those who would have backed Johnson may be a minority, but they are a large one – over a third. If that finding turns out to be an accurate reading of activists’ views during the coming weeks, Sunak will come under yet more fire.
Then by contrast there is the prospect of a Sunak-Truss final. This would be a very different affair. Instead of a man who was recently Chancellor of the Exchequer versus a woman who isn’t in the Cabinet, one would have a man who was recently Chancellor of the Exchequer versus a woman who is Foreign Secretary. Mordaunt was a Cabinet member for less than three months. Truss has been so for the best part of ten years.
So a Truss-Sunak final would represent an outcome as close to business as usual as a Conservative leadership contest can produce.
Neither candidate are exactly founding members of the One Nation Group. In the crude but useful language of Tory attitudes, Sunak is basically somewhere in the Conservative centre, much of the Parliamentary Party’s left-of-Party-centre vote has ended up in his column, and Truss is a bit to his right. Mordaunt is harder to categorise, which is why a Sunak-Truss contest would offer members a clearer choice in terms of ideology, though not necessarily a better one.
Our most recent survey found that Sunak had closed the gap on Truss by ten points. Yesterday’s YouGov reported that he done so by five. YouGov and ConHome also agree that he has closed the gap on Mordaunt (YouGov found that she would win by 14 points, having been winning by 40, and we found that he would win by three, having previously been losing by 17).
Perhaps Team Sunak will slip Mordaunt a few votes today to put her in the final. Or maybe they will believe Truss is easier to beat. They fervently deny that they will do anything of the kind and that they did so yesterday either.
That might be correct. The rise in Truss’s vote by 15 yesterday may not have been triggered by a surreptitious transfer from Sunak, thus ensuring that his vote rose by only two. Instead, she may have drawn support from Badenoch, with the latter in turn picking up support from Tugendhat’s eliminated votes.
Who knows? All that can safely be said is that if Team Sunak try covertly to transfer votes to anyone else today, they risk ensuring that their own man doesn’t top the ballot. Which Sunak will want to do: for like Mordaunt and Truss, he would like to be able to claim that he is his colleagues’ choice.
Taken together, our survey and YouGov’s poll suggest that Sunak is racing against time. As matters stand, he seems to be closing the gap between his cause and Truss’s in the eyes of the Party members. But with the vote now due to begin at the end of next week, he has a lot of ground to catch up if both make the final.