Have we learnt anything new from the Tory leadership debate?

Sean O’Grady reports back on what it revealed about the two prospective leaders – and what it didn’t

Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick are the final two candidates in the contest to become leader of the Conservative Party (PA Media)

The one and only “debate” between Tory leadership contenders Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick has taken place on GB News, and, by the look of things, there won’t be any more. The programme, two hours long, suffered the channel’s usual quota of technical problems (much of it was out of sync) and amateurish production values. Even so, Christopher “Chopper” Hope, the political editor at GB News, managed to pitch some of the more obvious questions and criticisms at the pair, albeit with the slightly hesitant air of a man who wouldn’t really like to lose “access” to either of them.

It was worth watching, if only for what it revealed about the present mental state of the Conservative Party and those who seek to take it back to power...

What was the debate like?

It wasn’t actually a debate in any meaningful sense, because the pair never confronted – or, thereby, challenged – one another, which might have produced some clearer blue water between them and given us a few zingers. No such luck. Instead, they both had a chance to make their by now familiar cases, answer predictable questions from the audience – all Tory members, predominantly from the southeast of England – and offer equally well-rehearsed replies. They’ve been doing this for months, after all.

Will there be any others?

Almost certainly not. GB News seems to have bagged this one because it readily agreed to the strictures laid down by the Conservative Party – an audience composed solely of party members, and no direct “blue on blue” scrapping between this usually belligerent pair.

Hope, formerly of The Daily Telegraph and a bit more sympatico than some of his counterparts, was an agreeable sort of host, which must also have helped with the channel’s bid to secure broadcasting rights. After all, two former Tory MPs are still GB News presenters (Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lee Anderson), and the channel’s unbalanced pro-right-wing output has been queried by Ofcom many times.

By contrast, the formats proposed by the BBC and The Sun, with a broader audience and more combative chairing, were not to the party’s tastes; but the more fundamental obstacle was simply that, while Jenrick was willing to appear again, Badenoch was not, and hasn’t been for some time. As the frontrunner, she has most to lose, and, despite (or because of) her preternatural self-belief, has a proven track record as a bit of what you might call a “Van der Gaffe generator”, making the average floating voter’s hair stand on end.

What did it tell us about the membership?

That they’re about as out of touch as you’d expect. With the partial exceptions of immigration and taxation, their preoccupations are far removed from those that concern what former candidate James Cleverly calls “normal” people. So issues such as the teaching of British history in schools, trans rights, multiculturalism, “two tier” policing, reparations for slavery, the constitutional status of the Chagos Islands, and the future of Nigel Farage took up a grossly disproportionate amount of time.

Immigration, immigration, immigration was a constant theme. It is an overwhelming obsession – and, according to Jenrick, it is the root of all society’s evils.

The more mainstream concerns of the wider electorate, such as the state of the NHS, state education, the economy more generally and the cost of living, got barely a mention.

What did we learn about Badenoch?

That one of the first things she would do in government, if not the very first thing, is to cancel VAT on private school fees – an unusual priority given everything else that’s crowding in on us. Aside from that, it appears she travels light on policy, arguing that the answers to the nation’s problems don’t lie in her head (which you might consider a bit worrying, at least if you thought she meant it) and that she prefers to state her principles rather than “throwing policies out there”.

She made conciliatory noises about wanting to involve the whole party in the effort to “renew”. It gives the impression that she’d embrace the One Nation lot as well as her more hardline natural supporters. Yet, from what can be glimpsed through her speeches and articles, there’s no doubt where she wants to take her party and the country – to an authoritarian, small-state, nationalistic future where traditional constitutional safeguards, such as independent courts, the impartial civil service, and agencies such as the Bank of England, are dismantled in the name of “democratic accountability”. This would really amount to an elective dictatorship with her in charge.

She said the whole political system is broken, and that she wants to acquire the powers to fix it as she sees fit; to crush the saboteurs, so to speak. Badenoch was much the better performer, more agile and quick-witted in argument, and mostly avoided her terrible tendency to patronise.

And Jenrick?

He wants the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, and pretty much thinks that would solve everything, including making him prime minister. Because of his centrist, liberal, Remain past and a patently cynically timed resignation from Sunak’s government “on principle” when it was obvious it was finally doomed, he appears, and is, far less authentic than Badenoch. The members seem to have sniffed that out by now.

Distractingly, too, he seems to wear eyeshadow. This, ironically enough given his views on the gender debate, carries a hint of progressive sentiment, and that surely cannot commend him to the Conservative base. Otherwise, his problem is that he’s so wooden you think he must be getting some hefty campaign donations from Cuprinol.

Who will win?

On the show of hands in the GB News studio, alongside what we can discern from the available anecdotal evidence and the bookies’ odds, Badenoch will stroll to victory. She will thus be a leader with a strong mandate from the membership, who warm to what they sense in her to be a set of shared basic instincts.