Overconfident James Cleverly supporters may have lost their candidate a place in the last two
There were audible gasps from MPs gathered in committee room 14 when the result of the final ballot was read out and the previous frontrunner James Cleverly was knocked out of the race.
A shock result that no one had seen coming after the former home secretary had a barnstorming party conference and raced past Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch to top Tuesday’s ballot with Conservative MPs.
One of his team, who at this point had decamped to the pub, lamented on the phone: “It’s absolutely brutal.”
And it really is.
So what went wrong?
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Well, they say the Conservative Party is the most sophisticated and duplicitous electorate there is, and in this case, these two characteristics collided with devastating results for Mr Cleverly.
Piecing together nuggets from different camps, it looks like in Tuesday’s round Mr Cleverly’s figures were a bit inflated by Jenrick backers flipping to him to help his momentum and slow Ms Badenoch’s.
But regardless of that, you would have expected Mr Cleverly as the only moderate left in the race to pick up Tom Tugendhat’s supporters.
That didn’t happen.
What seems to have happened instead is that some of the Cleverly supporters convinced their man was nailed on for the final two, flipped support to try to stop one of the other contenders and in doing so killed off their own candidate.
Meanwhile, Mr Jenrick called every single Tugendhat supporter to ask for their support, arguing – as he did on Sky News on Wednesday morning ahead of the vote – that Mr Cleverly was home and dry.
By the look of the final round of voting, Mr Tugendhat’s votes split between Ms Badenoch and Mr Jenrick with the only surviving moderate squeezed out.
A couple of Conservatives have also remarked to me that Mr Cleverly attended Boris Johnson’s book launch for much of yesterday evening, while his rivals were hitting the phones.
One attendee told me they were a bit surprised that he didn’t just drop back in and then get back to Westminster.
I also hear that Ms Badenoch hoovered up a number of Tugendhat votes by promising flippers the reward of shadow cabinet posts.
The upsum of all of it was they won out.
Now, whoever wins, a right-winger will be leading the Conservative Party.
It is an outcome that has left the Labour Party rubbing its hands in glee.
“A civil servant called me just after the vote came in, and said ‘that’s the general election gone for you then’,” said one Cleverly supporter.
Whether Mr Cleverly could have, in the end, edged past the right-wing candidate is an unknown.
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But what this result does do is rob a big chunk of the Conservative electorate of a moderate choice, which may well displease some.
As for the bigger question about the future of the party, the result could help the Conservatives fend off the threat of Reform on its right flank, but there are serious doubts among many Tories about whether either Ms Badenoch or Mr Jenrick can reach beyond the Conservative Party and Reform voters to be a serious threat to Labour or rebuild with those who left them for the Lib Dems.
You can see why Sir Keir Starmer, after a punishing few weeks, finally has something to smile about.