Priti Patel’s fate proves Boris is a busted flush with the Tories

The Prittster’s surprise ejection from the leadership content – and in the first round – consigns the former prime minister who appointed her home secretary to the history books, says John Rentoul

Come unstuck: Boris Johnson and his then home secretary Priti Patel, on a visit to Surrey Police headquarters in Guildford (PA) (PA Wire)

They didn’t stick with The Prittster after all. If anyone was the continuity Boris Johnson candidate, it was Priti Patel, and she has been eliminated from the Tory leadership contest after winning just 14 votes in the first ballot of MPs.

The party is moving on from the confusing legacy of the Johnson years. After the trauma of Johnson being forced out of No 10, which caused deep resentment against Rishi Sunak among party members, the greater disaster of the election defeat has prompted a rethink about Johnson’s record on immigration.

The most significant thing about the first ballot result is that it confirmed Robert Jenrick as the front runner. Excited talk among some of his MP supporters about him winning the votes of half of Tory MPs at the first time of asking turned out to fall some way short of the mark, but with 28 votes he emerged six votes clear of Kemi Badenoch, who had started out as the favourite.

Jenrick’s lead confirms the importance of immigration as the issue of this election. He has set out the clearest anti-immigration policies, including repudiating the European Court of Human Rights, and has the credibility of having resigned from the last Tory government over the issue.

And if immigration is the issue, that means the record of the Johnson years must be buried.

It was Johnson, after all, who was primarily responsible for the post-Brexit borders policy that saw net immigration rise to 700,000 in 2022. However grateful MPs and party members might be to Johnson for getting Brexit done, and however sore they feel about the way he was forced from office, they are now looking for someone who can win the issue back from Nigel Farage – a task to which Jenrick has applied himself with some rigour.

So Patel is out. Her record as home secretary was not enough to save her. She may have been responsible for the Rwanda deportation plan, but she was Johnson’s home secretary who jointly presided over the rise in legal immigration. She had used her time out of office to work hard on trying to win over some surprising “One Nation” Tory MPs on the left of the party, but most of the ones who supported her lost their seats.

And the second most significant thing about the first ballot was that Kemi Badenoch, in second place, was only one vote ahead of James Cleverly. Terms such as left and right can often be unhelpful, but they still mean something in the parliamentary Conservative party. If Jenrick and Badenoch are the right-wing candidates, then the “left” might unite behind Cleverly and put him in the top two, squeezing Badenoch out.

On the other hand, the more that Jenrick becomes the front runner, the more that Tory MPs who have their doubts about him will try to second-guess which candidate would be most likely to stop him.

Given Badenoch’s one-time status as the darling of the Tory grassroots, perhaps that will give her the chance to pull it back. The risk for the left of presenting party members with a choice between Jenrick and Cleverly is that Cleverly, another former home secretary, will be seen as too associated with the failings of the Home Office himself.

We could be heading for another close three-way contest to decide the final two. Remember that Liz Truss overtook Penny Mordaunt in the last round to secure her place alongside Sunak in the members’ ballot two years ago.

What is striking, though, is the receding tide of Johnsonism. We may find out how much star power the former prime minister still has when his memoir, Unleashed, is published next month. His endorsement may still carry some weight if he expresses a preference between the final two – but it will be much less than he would have hoped for only a few months ago.