Key events
The national newspapers are ignoring the Conservative leadership contest on their front pages this morning. But the i has polling which should come as good news to the new Tory leader. In his story, Hugo Gye says the Conservatives are ahead of Labour in a voting intention poll. He says:
The Conservatives have regained a polling lead over Labour for the first time in three years in the wake of the Budget, a new survey suggests.
A BMG Research poll for i shows that just a quarter of the public feel positive about the government’s first budget this week, with 40 per cent disapproving of the package set out by Rachel Reeves.
Voters are much more likely to say that the measures announced by the chancellor will leave them worse off than that they will benefit from the higher spending funded by tax rises and borrowing.
More funding for the NHS, schools and potholes are all overwhelmingly popular, according to the survey, but voters are split on the £25bn tax hike for businesses and opposed to the idea of increasing the cap on bus fares from £2 to £3.
This is what my colleague Eleni Courea posted on social media last night about what she has heard about the results of the contest.
NEW – I hear the turnout in the Tory leadership contest was above 70% and that the winner has a decent margin of victory…
James Cleverly says he won’t serve in shadow cabinet as Tories set to announce winner of leadership contest
Good morning. Conservative party members have chosen a new leader and the winner will be announced shortly after 11am at an event in London. This has only happened four times before since William Hague changed the rules a quarter of century ago to ensure members, not MPs, take the final decision about who should be leader. The process has not always worked very well – there’s been a failure rate of at least 50%, conventional wisdom would say – which is one reason why Hague thinks his rule change has been a mistake.
The two obvious failures were Iain Duncan Smith, who was elected leader in 2001 but replaced after two years after MPs concluded he was not up to the job, and Liz Truss, who only lasted two months. The members’ decision to elect David Cameron in 2005 is generally seen as a good one, because he led his party back into power and won a second, surprise election victory. Members also voted for Boris Johnson in 2019; like Cameron, he also turned out to be an election-winner, but his record as PM was so dire, and caused such lasting reputational damage to the party, that it is arguable that this was a bad choice too.
This time members have had to choose between Kemi Badenoch, the former business secretary, and Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister. It is often assumed that the most rightwing candidate will always win in a Conservative leadership contest, and that helps to explain what happened with Duncan Smith and Truss; members chose the rightwinger when polling evidence said a more “centrist” rival would have been more popular with floating voters and the public at large. But this contest has been unusual in that both candidates on the final ballot were running as rightwingers. James Cleverly, the former foreign secretary and former home secretary, who was the leading “moderate” in the contest and who was the clear winner of the Conservative conference leadership “beauty contest”, was unexpectedly knocked out in the final ballot of MPs.
Badenoch is expected to win. There have not been any recent polls of members (polling is expensive, and media interest in the outcome of the contest is not exactly enormous) but the ConservativeHome website carries out surveys of party members which have always reliably predicted the winner in leadership contests and its last one, published on 25 October, said Badenoch was comfortably ahead. It had her on 55%, Jenrick on 31% and don’t knows on 14%.
My colleague Esther Addley has written profiles of the two candidates which are here.
Today I will be focusing almost entirely on the Tory leadership contest, although I may cover some other UK politics as well. The results are being announced at an event in London where Richard Fuller, the party chair, will say a few words, and Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 Committee, will unveil the winner. The new leader will then deliver a short speech.
At some point the new leader will have to appoint a shadow cabinet, but it is not clear yet when that will happen. One person, however, won’t be available; Cleverly has said he wants to stay on the backbenches. The revelation came in an article by Lucy Fisher, who interviewed him for her paper’s “Lunch with the Financial Times” feature slot. She writes:
[Cleverly] has voted in the leadership contest, but will not confirm whether he backed Badenoch or Jenrick. He resolutely refuses to critique — let alone criticise — either candidate, conceding only that he does not “always agree” with them.
All three indicated they envisaged a smaller state and lower taxes. But Cleverly did not share Badenoch’s crusade against “woke” ideology, while he diverged from Jenrick over his vows to quit the European Convention on Human Rights and to radically reduce net inward migration to “tens of thousands” of people annually.
While he insists he will do everything he can to ensure the victor is a “roaring success”, he reveals he will do so from the backbenches for now — he is not planning to serve in the next leader’s team as a shadow minister.
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