Suella Braverman was sure to be skipped in first stage of Tory leadership battle

Good morning. Rachel Reeves will deliver her big “the Tories have done such things, what they were, we knew not, but they are the terrors of the earth” speech later today.

The big picture politics here is that Labour has come into power at a time when people are deeply dissatisfied with the state of the public services and when the economy has had a prolonged period of sluggish growth going all the way back to the financial crisis in 2007.

When Labour came into office in 1997, it inherited an economy in great shape and a public realm in very poor repair. When the Conservatives came into office in 2010, they inherited public finances in a bad state, an economy still reeling from the financial crisis, but a state in good nick.

In different ways, the governments of Tony Blair and David Cameron were able to use those mixed legacies to get their desired policies through and to be re-elected. In different ways, Blair and Cameron’s 2001 and 2015 re-election messages were both “we’ve turned a corner. Don’t let them take us back”.

Reeves is trying to pull off a similar trick, but in a situation where she knows that her closing argument at the next election might well be the distinctly uninspiring “the car is still in the ditch. Don’t give the keys back to the guys who crashed it”.

The effectiveness of that message will depend on all sorts of things — including who will represent “the guys who crashed it”, or less pejoratively, the Conservatives. Some thoughts on how the Tory leadership contest is going now that the opening field looks settled.

My 10 Tory MPs go to another school

Suella Braverman has bowed out of the Conservative leadership election, writing in an enjoyably vituperative article for the Telegraph that while she did have sufficient support to stand (to get on to the ballot paper, candidates need 10 MPs’ nominations by today’s deadline), the parliamentary party is sufficiently opposed to her that there is no point in standing:

Although I’m grateful to the 10 MPs who wanted to nominate me for the leadership, getting on to the ballot is not enough. There is, for good or for ill, no point in someone like me running to lead the Tory party when most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription. The traumatised party does not want to hear these things said out loud. Instead, platitudes about “unity” are fashionable. That’s all fine but it’s not honest . . . I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory party does not want to hear the truths I’ve set out.

Listeners to the FT’s Political Fix podcast will know that this isn’t much of a surprise. When George Parker asked me to assess the candidates I said that Braverman was irrelevant as she was not going to get the numbers to stand. John Hayes, a big intellectual and organisational influence on the right of the party, who had backed her in the last contest, had instead endorsed Robert Jenrick. That pretty much killed her leadership bid before it had started.

Jenrick’s most important success thus far is that during his stint as a rebellious backbencher, he made himself the natural home for MPs who backed Braverman last time. And when he was a government minister, he never strayed far from the line to take — enabling him to retain enough credibility to be able to pick up at least some support from the party’s centre. He faces a difficult path to the final two in the autumn — the top two picks by Tory MPs will go forward to a vote of the party membership — but he is, I think, well-placed.

In reality, the parliamentary stage of the race isn’t one contest. There are two slots up for grabs, one broadly speaking on the right of the party, and one broadly speaking on the left. Jenrick’s remaining rivals on the right of the party are all in one way or another carrying a wound. Priti Patel has a formidable outreach operation, supporting candidates in their constituencies, remembering little details such as birthdays, but she was home secretary when the small boats issue first came to the fore and that is hard to overcome.

Kemi Badenoch, who announced her bid in the Times, has very vocal fans. But the problem with running as a truth-teller who isn’t worried about party unity — though she has a point — is that this is the kind of message MPs often reject in favour of someone more emollient.

Jenrick would then have to defeat one of Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride or James Cleverly among party members, which is not a guarantee either, but he is the candidate who I would rather be at this stage of the contest.

Now try this

I saw Inside Out 2 this weekend — I liked it a great deal, and thought it was better than the original, a charming film on early adolescence with plenty of great jokes. My partner found it a good but inferior sequel. Danny Leigh was also less effusive about it that me in his review, which you can read here.

Top stories today

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