She may have the X factor, but why would Kemi Badenoch want to lead her party to defeat?

The business secretary has precisely no designs on the top job – at least not this side of a general election, writes John Rentoul. It is almost as if the plotters putting her name forward to replace Rishi Sunak don’t have her best interests at heart…

Unity candidate in waiting: Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary (Liam McBurney/PA)

The latest twist in the plot to get rid of Rishi Sunak is that Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, would be drafted to use her “X factor” to promote the rebels’ platform and lead the Conservatives into the election.

Given that Badenoch has made her views clear – that the party should unite behind Sunak, and that anyone promoting her as an alternative leader before the election is “no friend of mine” – you do have to wonder about the tactical skill of the plotters.

“Kemi has the X factor, she has the capacity to cut through and communicate,” one MP who is “familiar with the rebels’ thinking” told The Times. “She can carry off the policy platform that’s being drawn up.”

Whether this MP is trying to help the rebels or make fun of them, the report does not say – but the plan has all the cunning of one of Baldrick’s worst. The idea that yet another change of prime minister would persuade people that the Conservative Party was a strong and competent outfit that deserves their vote after all was never very plausible.

But the idea that the plotters should replace Sunak with a candidate they don’t positively want – but who will have to do, because there is no one else – is so untethered from reality that it is no surprise only two Tory MPs are publicly calling for Sunak to go.

What is worse is that there is no reason to think that Badenoch would be interested in encouraging such talk. Even if she could be installed swiftly and painlessly, the Tories’ chances of saving the election would be no better than if they persevere with Sunak and his plan. Not even if she could defy the laws of economics, arithmetic and logistics and deliver bigger tax cuts, lower immigration and shorter NHS waiting lists than Sunak in the dying months of the Conservative government, would she make much difference.

The plotters’ policies were set out in the daft opinion poll paid for by the shadowy Conservative Britain Alliance, which asked people if they preferred Keir Starmer or an imaginary prime minister who would achieve these imaginary things before the election.

It seems obvious that Badenoch would be foolish to take the top job even if it were offered on a plate. Why would she want to lead the Tories to a near-certain defeat? And why would the plotters want to change their leader and then find themselves blamed for defeat? Better for her, and for them, to wait until after the election and fight it out then.

After the election, Badenoch could present herself as a unity candidate who could take the various factions of Tory fundamentalists and bring them together with the pragmatic mainstream.

Equally, after the election, the plotters organised by Lord Frost, Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, could blame Sunak for defeat and try to use their “betrayal” message to rally the party behind a purist candidate to be the leader of the opposition.

Nothing about the plan to get rid of Sunak before the election makes sense. The plotters appear to accept that Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, is not a viable leadership candidate – the reaction to her is “too vitriolic”, according to The Times’s source.

So they want to draft Badenoch, whose name is mud in purist Eurosceptic circles because she took a pragmatic view of scrapping EU law. “The European Research Group (ERG) hate her,” the anonymous MP told The Times as if this was a point in her favour because Tory moderates think she is sensible, so “she can bring people together”.

The ERG has not been a powerful or coherent force in parliament since Brexit – although this may change after the election.

The only benefit to Badenoch of being talked about as a possible leader before the election is that it helps to maintain her profile as a potential candidate after it. But the atmosphere in the Tory party is likely to be very different following a poll defeat. It is hard to predict what might emerge from the turmoil afterwards.

One possibility is that Sunak will stay on as leader and try to push through a change to the leadership election rules, as Michael Howard tried after the 2005 election defeat. It would be in Sunak’s character to want to solve the knotty constitutional problem of rules that allow the election of a party leader against the wishes of a majority of the party’s MPs. But Howard’s attempt to restore the decision to MPs was defeated when it failed to secure the required two-thirds majority of local party associations.

Those who argue that a leader ought to have the positive support of a majority of a party’s MPs must hope that the plotters – who advocate handing more power to the grassroots members – are as tactically inept as they have proved so far.