In our first survey of the leadership contest, Kemi Badenoch led her closest rival (Robert Jenrick, by a nose) by a very healthy 13 points on members’ first preferences, taking 26 per cent.
A couple of weeks later, in the second survey, she extended that lead to 14 points; although a similar surge in support for Jenrick kept the gap roughly the same, the Shadow Housing Secretary picked up seven points and took a full third of first preferences.
This morning, as the Conservative MPs prepare to drop the axe on the dreams of the first hopeful and following a month in which Badenoch has missed numerous hustings and gone on holiday, her lead is… 16 points, the difference owing to very marginal shifts in her and Jenrick’s positions.
Say what you like about submarines, but if nobody’s packing depth charges they are undeniably effective.
Farther down, it’s a similarly unexciting story: Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly, Priti Patel, and Mel Stride are all in the same relative positions as last time, with only small fluctuations in their headline totals. For all members’ opinions have shifted since the close of nominations, the first five weeks of this very long campaign might as well not have happened.
Perhaps interest will rise as the MPs start culling the candidates. There are lots of factors that affect how MPs vote: ideology, personal loyalty, and promised favours not least amongst them. But hanging over all that is the spectre of the members’ round, and the all-important calculation of who would beat whom.
So this month, we asked our panel how they’d vote in all 15 possible final-round face-offs. Here are their win/loss records:
No surprises here: the results are almost exactly in line with the order in which our panel rank their first preferences. The only difference is the reversed position of Cleverly and Tugendhat; the latter has maintained a narrow lead on first preferences but fares slightly worse in the final round.
However, this probably doesn’t matter. Both candidates in the middle tertile defeat both candidates in the lower tertile and lose to either candidate in the upper tertile. Cleverly’s edge matter’s only if any MP is unwilling to vote for Badenoch or Jenrick and hell-bent on stopping Tugendhat.
In fact, this pattern holds for all the results: every candidate defeats every candidate below them and loses to every candidate ranked above them – albeit sometimes narrowly. Below are the full results for each candidate.
Kemi Badenoch
Robert Jenrick:
James Cleverly:
Tom Tugendhat
Priti Patel
Mel Stride
Postscript: in the head to heads, our findings line up with YouGov’s recent results for both the front-runners, with Badenoch winning all five match-ups and Jenrick four. Interestingly, this latter is despite quite a different result for Jenrick in first preferences, where YouGov has him fourth.