Is this the moment the Tory leadership contest finally became interesting?

As Mel Stride becomes the latest candidate to be knocked out of the race to succeed Rishi Sunak, whoever wins this contest, it will only be the beginning of the next phase in the Tories’ civil war, writes Sean O’Grady

‘The Tories are, essentially, electing an interim leader’ (Getty/PA)

This may be taken as a perverse reason, were any required, to read no further, but in the post-spin age of misinformation, we must try to be honest when we can be.

So, I have to admit from the outset that the best way to treat the current Tory leadership contest – the second round of which has just seen Mel Stride eliminated, and Kemi Badenoch recover some of her earlier momentum – is as pure spectator sport, one with nothing very substantial at stake. A pre-season friendly, rather than a league-defining match.

Whichever of the four remaining candidates emerges from this obscure struggle is certain not to be the next prime minister of the UK – at least, not at the next election.

Despite a turbulent start and an underwhelming election win (camouflaged by the voting system), even if Labour lose a lot of ground at the next election, Reform UK and the other parties will probably be the beneficiaries – and the Tories less so.

And even if the Conservatives did somehow manage to become the largest party in parliament, the Lib Dems would not, next time round, help them into government. Neither would Nigel Farage. The Tories are, essentially, electing an interim leader.

That said – and with relatively little riding on it – it is still fascinating to watch.

Before things even got going, Suella Braverman – once one of the favourites – couldn’t muster a campaign. Instead, we saw how her extremism and unsuitability for the post had finally exhausted the patience of her staunchest allies, such as John Hayes, who is no one’s idea of a “wet”.

That was a fragment of a straw in the wind that suggested the party was getting back its senses.

Then there was the failure of Priti Patel in the initial round of votes – she surely suffered for her campaign to take power away from MPs and hand it to the grassroots membership. Had she managed to make it to the final shortlist that goes out to the members, then hers might have been a winning pitch. But that was the catch-22 that tripped her up. That and, possibly, one of the stronger candidates “lending” some support to Mel Stride to be sure she’d be eliminated, assuming he’d be easier to beat.

This cynical tactic by a frontrunner of deliberately bolstering a weaker candidate to get them into the final round where they can be ceremonially thrashed has become an increasingly prominent feature of the contests. And it’s driven by the way the election is structured – that final shortlist of two going to the membership, the system of successive rounds (rather than one round of preferential voting), and the secrecy about how MPs do vote. It creates these kind of slightly unreal scenarios – and obviously so.

In 2019, it was a case of Boris Johnson, the clear favourite, and his team, headed by the crafty Gavin Williamson, lending support to Rory Stewart in the early rounds to dispatch stronger figures. Later on, they artificially boosted Jeremy Hunt at the expense of his old rival Michael Gove, because Gove was rightly considered to pose the bigger risk to Johnson in the final stages. So Hunt overtook Gove in the final round of parliamentary selection.

That exercise worked, but it went less happily for the party – and for Sunak when he manoeuvred his supporters to make sure he went head to head with Liz Truss rather than Penny Mordaunt in the first contest in 2022. The Sunakians calculated, in the words of Anthony Seldon’s recent biography of her, that Truss was “easier to beat than Mordaunt in the membership stage. They believed she was fundamentally silly and would self-destruct; as Williamson put it, ‘we thought she would implode on the campaign trail: we were right, but wrong about the timing’”.

Sunak thus inadvertently gave the keys to No 10 to Truss, who never enjoyed the backing of MPs (Sunak was always ahead there), though it left Sunak the clear heir apparent by the time of her premature exit. It’s fair to say the Conservative way of choosing its leader didn’t serve the nation well on that occasion.

Of course, there will always be games played and stratagems deployed. Even when the choice of leader was confined to MPs, they could be fooled by a smart operator. That’s what Airey Neave, campaign manager for Margaret Thatcher, did so famously in the 1975 contest.

Bravely, Thatcher challenged the incumbent and former premier Edward Heath, and wasn’t expected to oust him. But Neave told MPs that her campaign was going so badly they could afford to express their (widespread) dissatisfaction with Heath and vote for her as a kind of protest.

She didn’t win, but did so well that Heath had to withdraw, leaving her in pole position to take over, as she did.

In due course, she, too, was to find herself challenged – and beaten – by a quirk in the system that meant she had to not just win but do so by a significant majority (15 per cent). In 1990, she fell just a few votes short, and, like the previously humiliated Heath, stood down before the next round of voting.

Indeed, even in the days before leadership elections, when Tory leaders or premiers “emerged” after “consolations,” there was plenty of what Donald Trump recently called “skulduggery” and plotting, the 1963 competition (not election) to succeed Harold Macmillan being a notorious example of an elite abusing its power in a more democratic age. (With the 2005 Davis-Cameron fight, the 1963 party conference was the last before 2024 to become a “beauty contest”).

So it is all to play for in 2024 – and the early rounds of voting are rather deceptive. The MPs aren’t voting for a leader as such, but for the pair who’ll go to the members’ ballot – a crucial distinction. It’s hard to read what’s really going on – and accidents can happen (see Truss).

With such a large cohort of new members, things are trickier to predict than otherwise; contrariwise, with a denuded parliamentary party, it must be slightly easier for the team managers to sense the ebbs and flows of opinion. So far, Gove protegee and former runaway favourite Kemi Badenoch is stuck fast behind Robert Jenrick, whose effort is being coordinated by Danny Kruger.

Third-placed James Cleverly seems still to be in the running – or is his progress illusory? It’s fair to say that as the most senior of the bunch (ex-foreign secretary, ex-home secretary and ex-party chair), he should always have been the frontrunner. Maybe he is a bit too associated with recent failures (he is sticking to the Rwanda plan) and a bit ancien regime.

You get the impression that there’s a definite “Stop Badenoch” movement, at any rate, with an outside chance she won’t make it to the final shortlist of two, probably with Cleverly overtaking her with covert Jenrick support as easier to beat.

If so, the membership won’t appreciate that and, as with so many previous Tory leadership elections – in fact most of them – there will be a lasting sense of betrayal and bitterness. Whoever wins this contest, it will only be the beginning of the next phase in the Tories’ civil war.