Who’d want to lead the Tories after electoral wipeout? And the nominees are…

If the Westminster whispers are true, a clutch of Conservative big beasts are busy positioning themselves to take over from Rishi Sunak, says John Rentoul. But might the prime minister defy his critics and – for the sake of his broken party – ‘do a Michael Howard’ and stay on in opposition?

Tory leading lights – including (clockwise from left) Penny Mordaunt, Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, Grant Shapps and Priti Patel – are all said to be on manoeuvres (Getty)

Mark Littlewood, who fronts “PopCon” – the right-wing Popular Conservatives which launched themselves, with some fanfare, in February – reportedly thinks that the former home secretary Priti Patel should be the “Truss-style libertarian” candidate in the race to be the next Tory leader.

They just cannot help themselves, can they?

Patel would like to be leader, so she doesn’t want to discourage think-tankers and Conservative MPs from talking up her chances. Several MPs who would like to be leader have adopted the same posture – of cultivating fellow MPs and spending a lot of time talking to local Tory associations without ever explicitly mentioning that there might be a leadership election soon.

Patel has surprisingly wide support. I was taken aback the other day when a dripping-wet One Nation Tory MP told me he would support her for the leadership. “There’s no one from my wing of the party,” he said, and she is “very good with people”. When I protested that she had hardly been an outstanding success at the Home Office, he said: “It will all be very different the moment the general election is out of the way.”

There are other candidates, some of them working to different timetables. Penny Mordaunt, for example, is said to be in a hurry to become leader before the general election, in part because her Portsmouth North seat is at risk.

I am not so sure about that: on current opinion polls, she would just hold on if there is a uniform national swing away from the Tories. However, according to the Survation MRP “mega poll” in The Sunday Times at the weekend, her seat would fall to Labour, as would hundreds of others, leaving the Tories with just 98 MPs.

This may explain why the leader of the House of Commons has been a little more daring in putting herself forward, writing to The Daily Telegraph last week to deny that she had attended 40 local association events since Rishi Sunak became prime minister: “In fact, I have made more than 70 such visits… I am pleased to have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for our prospective candidates, incumbent MPs and local associations, and I intend to continue such visits in the coming weeks and months.”

The other MP who is said, by other politicians, to be more explicitly “on manoeuvres” is Grant Shapps, the defence secretary. “Everyone else is at least doing it relatively subtly,” said one anonymous MP to the i paper. “Grant isn’t being subtle at all.”

I suspect that some of this is recycled gossip from fellow MPs who resent Shapps’s incessant and cheerful self-promotion. Some of them think he has got above himself for someone who failed to find the 20 backers needed to stand for the leadership in 2022, and that his five days as home secretary at the end of Truss’s premiership went to his head.

Stories of his holding “Schnapps With Shapps” drinks parties for fellow MPs have resurfaced after he denied them last month: “I have never done schnapps with Shapps. I don’t think I have had schnapps my entire adult life.” But the rhyme is clearly irresistible, and the defence secretary’s sociability provides a ready excuse for the environmentally friendly reuse of a good line.

Shapps, too, may be a candidate in a hurry. His Welwyn Hatfield seat is even less safe than Mordaunt’s. But if he has asked colleagues if they would support him in the event of a vacancy after the local elections, now exactly one month away, my view is that he would be joining a very select band of Tory MPs who actually believe that it is both possible and desirable to replace Sunak as leader before the general election.

So far, only two Tory MPs have put their name publicly to this proposition: Miriam Cates and Simon Clarke. There are clearly more who are private assenters, but there are clearly not 53 of them, which is the number needed to write to Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 Committee, to demand a vote of confidence in the leader.

One Conservative whose judgement I trust says that, even if the local election results are the worst they can be, there are “no more than half a dozen” Tory MPs who think a change of leader has the slightest prospect of increasing the party’s popularity.

Talk of a leadership contest before the general election is, therefore, unrealistic. Perhaps the potential candidates or would-be kingmakers want to be ready, just in case – or because they believe recent speculation in the media, ignoring everything we know about Sunak’s character, that the prime minister will suddenly flounce out of office, saying he cannot be bothered any more.

The manoeuvring for a leadership contest after the election, however, is real and based on the reasonable assumption that there will soon be a vacancy.

Hence Suella Braverman’s four-day trip to Israel, to position herself as the most supportive of Israel over Gaza; she accuses Sunak and David Cameron, the foreign secretary, of allowing a “pro-Palestine approach” to take hold of our foreign policy. Hence Robert Jenrick, her former deputy at the Home Office, continuing to give interviews reminding Sunak that he told him the Rwanda-lite policy wouldn’t work.

And hence Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, who is still the betting favourite to become leader of the opposition, urging unity on her colleagues at every turn.

They are competing for a vacancy that has to occur at some time – but possibly not as soon as is usually assumed. It has become the fashion for party leaders to resign immediately after losing a general election, but I think that Sunak might stay on for a while.

He might try to succeed where Michael Howard failed after the 2005 election. Howard, it is almost forgotten now, tried to change the leadership election rules, restoring to Tory MPs the exclusive right to choose the leader. He persuaded a body called the Constitutional College of the Conservative Party to vote by 63.5 per cent to support the change, but this fell short of the two-thirds majority required.

After the disaster of Truss’s leadership, when she was forced on MPs by a majority of grassroots party members, perhaps sense will prevail this time. Unfortunately for the Tories, and for the quality of our democracy which requires an effective opposition, sense and the Tory party are currently strangers.