When the final two candidates emerge, they have serious repair work to do. They must ensure they’re speaking to the public about cost-of-living issues.
Badenoch was also top, Truss also second and Tugendhat also fifth in the main survey from which these results are drawn. Sunak was fourth in the main survey and third in these run-offs. He thus swaps places with Mordaunt.
And so Cabinet members other than Oliver Dowden take the advice I offered them on June 5 – namely, to tell the Prime Minister he should resign before he is forced out.
If we hold a leadership contest, we could have the open debate that we desperately need — and give ourselves a fighting chance in 2024.
Our findings and theirs are in the same territory even allowing for six months’ or so difference. There is no decisive view on who any replacement should be.
Whether or not you want to bin Johnson, it’s important that we give his replacement some serious thought.
He’s written a new book about avoidable deaths in the NHS, which plainly made a deep impression on him as Secretary of State.
MPs are better placed to understand public opinion. After all, they depend upon it to be re-elected.
And if he goes, what’s the interplay between a new Prime Minister and a Conservative leadership election?
The pollster finds the same two future leadership front runners as our survey – but in reverse order.
Both take roughly a fifth of the vote in our latest poll, and no other candidate wins even a tenth.
The province’s immediate future risks becoming enmeshed in her leadership ambitions – and Conservative reactions to them.
He has more than twice the support of the second-placed Truss. Mordaunt is third. No-one else makes it to double percentage figures.
We plan to send it out to our panel of party members roughly four times a year rather than monthly as previously.
Plus: Johnson’s future. When I went to a party with a shotgun and live cartridges. And: am I Diane Abbott’s maternal grandmother?