If you thought James Cleverly’s elimination from the Tory leadership race was a shock, read on…

The exit of the frontrunner is the most astonishing result in a Tory leadership ballot since Michael Portillo lost to Iain Duncan Smith, writes John Rentoul. And there may be one final twist in the tale…

When the herd moves, it moves, as Boris Johnson said of his parliamentary colleagues. It looks as if Conservative MPs assumed that James Cleverly would definitely be in the final two for the party leadership – not least because that was the unanimous opinion of the pundits.

Therefore, the priority for them was to block the candidate they least wanted. Some of Cleverly’s supporters switched.

Some of Tom Tugendhat’s supporters, who were expected, possibly even by themselves, to support Cleverly, must have decided it was more important to stop either Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch from making it to the last stage.

In aggregate, they overdid it. We have ended up with the most shocking result of a Tory leadership ballot since Michael Portillo, the favourite, was knocked out by Iain Duncan Smith by a single vote in 2001.

In a contest that has seen fortunes reversed several times, Badenoch was the big gainer this time, picking up 12 votes to Jenrick’s gain of 10 votes. That means Badenoch goes into the final round, the members’ vote, in the lead by a single vote – but as the favourite. Most polling of Tory party members puts her ahead of Jenrick.

Those polls include, crucially, a Conservative Home survey carried out after the party conference in Birmingham, where the four candidates made their speeches. It found that Badenoch beat Jenrick by 53 per cent to 33 per cent (excluding don’t-knows) – a convincing enough margin to obscure most doubts about the reliability of a self-selecting activists’ poll.

But not a big enough margin to rule out the possibility of a final twist in this most convoluted plot. There are still several weeks in which Tory members have to decide, and thus an almost infinite number of opportunities for one or other of the two candidates to trip themselves up – or, and this is less likely, to surprise the voters with a winning stratagem.

My guess now – as someone who this morning wrote a profile of James “normal” Cleverly on the assumption that he would definitely be in the final two – is that Badenoch will avoid the kind of missteps that have been a feature of her campaign, which has become increasingly disciplined as it has progressed.

But she has the curse of the front runner; the spell of the Ming vase; the knowledge that her opponent has nothing to lose and may feel liberated to fight more creatively and ruthlessly than she can.

Former business secretary Kemi Badenoch topped the latest ballot of Tory MPs, securing 42 votes (PA)

Even so, at the risk of jinxing the next stage, and recognising the joyous unpredictability of politics, the likelihood is that Badenoch will win.

She was popular with the grassroots two years ago, and many members resented not being allowed the chance to vote for her. She will be a more difficult proposition for Keir Starmer to handle. He may want to spend more time abroad and leave Angela Rayner to face her in the Commons – although some Labour folk are celebrating the falling at the penultimate fence of Cleverly, the candidate they thought would give them the most trouble.

Badenoch has always been the risky option for the Tory party. She is direct; she is authentic; people know where she stands – except when she says something a bit too right wing on maternity pay or useless civil servants, and then tries to half-retract it.

Her fighting spirit, sometimes directed at her own colleagues as well as at journalists who offend her, might attract the wrong sort of attention – but the Tories are more likely to be noticed if she is leader, which was something William Hague found frustratingly hard after the 1997 Labour landslide.

The Tory party needs to take some risks if it is to take the fight to a Labour government with a huge majority – but a majority that is built on shallow foundations that may not last.