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James Cleverly, former foreign secretary, has leapfrogged his Conservative leadership rival Robert Jenrick, former immigration minister, in a survey of Tory members, as the contest enters a crucial week.
Cleverly’s strong speech to last week’s Tory conference in Birmingham has blown the fight to succeed Rishi Sunak wide open, as the party’s 121 MPs prepare to whittle down four candidates to a shortlist of two.
According to a poll of Tory members by the grassroots website ConservativeHome, Cleverly wowed party members and is now running second in the survey behind shadow housing secretary Kemi Badenoch.
On Tuesday Tory MPs will vote to eliminate one of the four candidates, with the centrist former security minister Tom Tugendhat expected to be knocked out.
The MPs will then vote again on Wednesday to create a final shortlist of two candidates, to be presented to party members. The grass roots ballot closes on October 31 with a winner declared on November 2.
The final vote could be tight. Jenrick, who is fighting on a strong anti-immigration platform, is losing ground, while many MPs are concerned that while Badenoch may be combative, she is also prone to unforced errors.
The ConHome survey of 784 members found that Cleverly has momentum, picking up 12 points compared with the website’s pre-conference survey, and overtaking Jenrick, who gave a lacklustre speech in Birmingham.
“The row over the Chagos Islands, which broke out whilst the survey was open, clearly hasn’t hurt him much,” ConHome said, referring to last week’s transfer of UK sovereignty over the archipelago to Mauritius. Negotiations started in 2022 while Cleverly was foreign secretary.
The poll of Tory members gave Badenoch 32 points, Cleverly 25, Jenrick 19 and Tugendhat 12, and it also considered how each candidate would fare in a final head-to-head contest.
It concluded that Badenoch would beat Jenrick by a 53/33 margin, but that she would only beat Cleverly by 48/42. Cleverly would beat Jenrick by 54/36, according to the survey.
For some Tory MPs, the biggest question on Wednesday is whether they want to put Badenoch on the final ballot, given that the polls suggest she stands a strong chance of winning with party members.
Badenoch’s campaign style is direct, but some Tory MPs fear she is also unpredictable. Last week she suggested that maternity pay was too high, criticised the BBC as pro-Labour, and suggested that up to 10 per cent of civil servants were politically motivated leakers and should be jailed.
“It’s frankly embarrassing,” said one former cabinet minister, who has not declared for any candidate. “We have got to be better than that.”
In the last round Jenrick topped the ballot of MPs with 33 votes, with Badenoch second on 28 and Cleverly and Tugendhat on 21. If Tugendhat is eliminated on Tuesday, many of his votes could transfer to Cleverly, another centrist.
On Sunday Badenoch secured an unexpected vote of confidence from Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, who said: “She’s strong, she’s courageous and she will be an inspiration for conservatives not just in the United Kingdom, but all across the world.”