This Tory leadership ballot suits nobody, only perhaps Keir Starmer

Good morning. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. In the first round of the Conservative leadership election, moderate candidates between them got the votes of 65 MPs — more than enough to guarantee passage to the final round.

Now, in a shock result, Conservative members will choose from two candidates drawn from the right of the party, after James Cleverly went out in the fourth ballot (37 votes, down two from the previous round), meaning that Kemi Badenoch (42 votes, up 12) will face Robert Jenrick (41 votes, up 10).

Alan Watkins, my most illustrious predecessor as political editor at the New Statesman, gifted the political world a number of phrases. “The chattering classes”, “the men in grey suits”, that sort of thing.

It was he who coined the phrase “the most sophisticated electorate in the world” to describe the parliamentary Labour party, and not, as it is often misattributed to, the parliamentary Conservative party. He gave the group the title because Labour MPs — between electing their leader, the shadow cabinet, their various standing committees and whatnot — were then voting all the time. He was not thinking of the Conservative party, which at the time he coined it had voted in just one leadership election: the 1965 one in which they chose Ted Heath over Reggie Maudling.

If one mark of “sophistication” is how often your MPs have to vote, one thing we can say is that it seems likely that Tory MPs will become more and more sophisticated over the next few years.

Some thoughts on how it happened below.

Blue in the face

How did James Cleverly go from leading the third ballot to finishing third place in the fourth?

Some Tory MPs, thinking that Cleverly was a lock for the final round, voted tactically, either for their preferred second option to create a “win-win” final ballot or for the one they judged weaker in order to ease their man’s path to the leadership. Cleverly’s campaign are denying that they were involved in any “official” attempt to shape the ballot, while others are suggesting that supporters of Badenoch or Jenrick might have been moving their vote around.

Silly games from the Badenoch campaign seem unlikely in the extreme to me, given we have good reason to believe she will win regardless and her biggest problem has always been demonstrating that she has a base within the parliamentary party. Silly games from the Jenrick campaign are a touch more likely, but very high risk and this isn’t the contest they would want.

Essentially it means that we have a ballot that suits nobody, other than perhaps Keir Starmer. Jenrick faces a candidate whom every poll and scrap of data indicates he will be heavily defeated by. Cleverly is out of the contest in humiliating circumstances. And Badenoch, who should once again be seen as the frontrunner, will probably become leader with the support of just 42 MPs and even that lowly number will come with an unhelpful asterisk by it.

So why do I say “perhaps Keir Starmer”? Yes, it is superficially great news for the Labour party that the largest opposition party’s MPs have sat down, had a big think, and ended up eliminating the candidates whose public favourability didn’t get downgraded after the Conservative party conference.

Conservative members will now have a choice between two flavours of “we lost because we weren’t rightwing enough”, usually something an opposition party tells itself right before it loses another election.

But the reason why I don’t think it is good news for Starmer is I think governments themselves are poorly served when the opposition goes off on its own strange journey, and there is no guarantee that a crisis, whether externally or of Labour’s making, might not hand power to its opponents anyway.

A date for your diaries: On the Friday after Labour’s Budget, my colleagues Lucy Fisher, Sam Fleming, Soumaya Keynes and Robert Shrimsley will debate what it means for the UK’s economic prospects in a lunchtime webinar. Free for subscribers to join here.

Now try this

I saw Caroline Shaw and the Kamus String Quartet at Wigmore Hall last night. They were really very brilliant, largely playing pieces from her record Evergreen, which you can listen to on Spotify here and Apple Music here. She’s the standout American classical composer of her generation, I think. Every piece of music we’ve recommended in all its, uh, eclectic glory is here and I promise I will get my act together and create an Apple Music one soon.

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