At first, the applicants kept coming. Hours after Boris Johnson resigned, Tom Tugendhat became the earliest challenger to announce, promising the first of many “clean starts”. But the ensuing battle in the summer heat was anything but.
Initially, 11 people came forward, including, confusingly, Rehman Chishti, who had been junior foreign minister for less than a week. He withdrew because he had no supporters as nominations closed. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps and former Health Secretary Sajid Javid also crashed at the first hurdle as neither managed to get 20 MPs to nominate them.
This was a surprise in Javid’s case. The man whose resignation prompted Johnson’s exit had already announced he would scrap the recent 1.25% rise in national insurance – with only a few other sources insisting he had argued in government for it to be 2%.
The party’s traditional left-right distinctions appeared to be irrelevant when Jeremy Hunt, a past runner-up and Tory candidate, announced Brexit campaigner Esther McVey would be his replacement. But he was thrown out in the first round of voting, as was Nadhim Zahawi, who had become chancellor a week earlier, only to campaign for Johnson to resign within a day or two of taking office.
Zahawi has already condemned the personal attacks on him in a statement: he said he had not been investigated by the Serious Fraud Office and had not benefited from an offshore trust. “It’s very sad that such taints should be spread,” he added, although it wasn’t enough to prevent him finishing second to last with 25 votes to Hunt’s 18 – both short of the 30 threshold needed to continue .
So far the race has been moving at the pace of a Japanese game show or perhaps a British one, as former Splash challenger Penny Mordaunt, junior trade secretary and former defense secretary, became the most talked-about candidate after coming an impressive second, 67 votes behind race leader Rishi Sunak with 88 and unexpectedly underperforming Liz Truss with 50.
Talk swirled in Westminster that Tory MPs were either “everyone but Rishi” or “everyone but Liz”, and Mordaunt appeared to be taking advantage of his leadership campaign, which launched with the curious slogan of being “less for the leader and much more for the ship”. A Conservative Home poll of party members also put Mordaunt at the top of the popularity list, suggesting she could win.
A panicked right wing of the party struggled to find a standard-bearer. Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg backed Liz Truss, with the latter attacking Sunak as a high-tax chancellor. Suella Braverman, heavily backed by key Brexit backers such as Steve Baker, refused to back down, with one ally sending a Venn diagram to a journalist claiming that, unlike Truss, the attorney general was “strong on Brexit”. Braverman was next, however, as the race headed to the TV studios for the weekend as well.
The eight Conservative Party leadership candidates (clockwise from left): Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch, Nadhim Zahawi, Suella Braverman, Liz Truss, Tom Tugendhat and Jeremy Hunt. Photo: Getty Images
Tugendhat, the outspoken chairman of the foreign affairs committee with no experience in government, made a strong appearance in the Channel 4 debate on Friday night. He won applause from the studio audience when he announced that he was the only candidate who had not voted for the increase in National Insurance “and now it looks like everyone else agrees with me”.
It was an opposition politician’s line and it was never going to be enough for the ruling party; he was eliminated the following Monday.
But the personal attacks reached an extraordinary level on Sunday night during ITV’s no-holds-barred debate, where each challenger was allowed to ask each other a question. Sunak asked Truss: “You have been both a Liberal Democrat and a Remainer. I’m just wondering which one do you regret the most?” Truss previously accused Sunak of “raising taxes to the highest level in 70 years.”
Labor were amazed by the ITV debate as they watched it unfold and the ammunition it had given them. A one-minute attack ad prepared by the opposition, simply featuring quote after quote from the debate contenders, attracted more than 3 million views online. The damage was already done by the time Sunak and Truss pulled out of Tuesday’s scheduled Sky News debate.
Such was the Conservative Party’s desire for something new after 12 years in government that Kemi Badenoch, a little-known junior minister, ruled strongly. As a candidate willing to fight culture war issues, it was no surprise that she targeted Mordaunt on the issue of trans rights.
Last weekend, Badenoch accused her rival of not realizing she was backing changes to gender recognition policy that could see medical requirements removed before transitioning is legally recognised. “I’m not going to call her a liar,” Badenoch said in an interview, but not too subtly, although Mordaunt insisted she had never supported self-identification, despite her rivals claiming otherwise.
However, Badenoch were the next to depart on Monday, leaving just three. Now Mordaunt was in trouble. The trade secretary has come under repeated personal attacks from the Truss-supporting Daily Mail and most publicly from her boss, trade secretary Anne Marie-Trevelyan, who accused Mordaunt of being a part-time minister so focused on a future leadership campaign that colleagues regularly “stole the pieces”.
By then Westminster had concluded that it was Truss who had the late impulse and Mordaunt was drawn to the left on social issues. When the heat finally started to die down, there was little surprise when it emerged that the Foreign Secretary had joined Sunak in the last two, climbing to 113 votes – eight ahead of Mordaunt.
Former Brexit Secretary David Davis said it was the “laziest campaign” he had ever seen. The veteran MP, a frustrated Mordaunt supporter, added: “The truth is we are electing the next Prime Minister of the UK, which should be done on the basis of rationality and democracy, not dirty tricks.”
But as the race shifts to members of the Conservative Party, will voters forget a group of candidates who are so eager to destroy the government’s record and each other?
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