Tory leadership election live: Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick await final results | Politics

Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick both say they want to unite the Conservative party if they become leader. But this morning, in the Daily Mail, there is a good illustration of why this will be so hard. As James Heale from the Spectator points out, the Mail is running extracts from the new paperback edition of Liz Truss’s memoirs in which the former PM strongly attacks her successor, Rishi Sunak.

Ahead of her paperback release, Liz Truss issues a scathing attack on Rishi Sunak in the Mail

Claims he was “complicit in amplifying Labour’s lies and spreading smears about me and my premiership”

Dubs him “a creature of the Whitehall machine” and says he skipped key meetings

Says Sunak was “fundamentally dishonest about illegal immigration, taxes, growth and inflation”

Tory MPs didn’t remove him as “most.. shared his belief in the establishment narrative”

Adds of remaining MPs: “It wasn’t so much survival of the fittest as survival of the wettest”

In the extract Truss says the “bulk” of Conservative MPs were also party responsible for the party’s election defeat. She says:

When I left office and Rishi became leader in October 2022, Reform’s poll rating had been around the 3 per cent mark. By the time he called the election, they were consistently in double figures on around 12 per cent and were exceeding 14 per cent by polling day.

The blame for that lies entirely on Rishi’s shoulders. Instead of acknowledging the truth about the difficult state the country was in, he tried to press release his way to success. He was fundamentally dishonest about illegal immigration, taxes, growth and inflation.

Yet it needs to be acknowledged that this dishonesty was not limited to him. It was also reflected in the bulk of the parliamentary party. The reason Rishi was not removed by MPs when he was leading us to consistently disastrous poll ratings and a dire performance against his own targets is that most of them shared his belief in the establishment narrative. They fundamentally misunderstand Britain.

It is also why he has not been properly taken to task for the worst Conservative defeat in 200 years. The Conservative parliamentary party did not want to acknowledge their complicity in backing the status quo over the real change the country needed – and still needs.

But there is other polling around that should be much more sobering for the next Conservative leader – whether it is Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick. YouGov has released polling figures about the two candidates, and it suggests the public at large don’t like either of them very much.

Here are the key findings.

• Many voters have not formed a view about Badenoch and Jenrick – but those who have are more likely to dislike them than like them, and as the leadership contest has been running this summer, the two candidates have become more unpopular, not less. In its write-up YouGov says:

At present, only one in eight Britons (12-13%) have a favourable opinion of either Badenoch or Jenrick. In large part, this because relative few Britons have any opinion of the two leadership contenders, with 43% of Britons saying they ‘don’t know’ how they feel about Badenoch and 47% saying so of Jenrick.

The new leader will pin their hopes on converting these many ‘unsure’ Britons, but that can’t be taken for granted. Where public opinion on the candidates has shifted in the last few months, it has largely been in the negative direction. Compared to the end of July, the proportion of Britons with an unfavourable opinion of Badenoch has risen from 37% to 45%, while those with a negative view of Jenrick has increased from 27% to 40%.

By comparison, the number with a favourable opinion of Jenrick has increased from 8% to 13%, while the figure for Badenoch has remained effectively level (11% vs 12%).

• Badenoch and Jenrick are both unpopular with at least a quarter of those who voted Tory at the last election, the polling suggests. In its analysis, YouGov says:

A significant proportion of Conservative voters already have negative opinions of both leadership contenders. While 35% of those who backed the Tories in July have a favourable view of both Jenrick and Badenoch, one in four (26%) have an unfavourable opinion of the former and three in ten (29%) of the latter.

One in six Britons (16%) think Kemi Badenoch would make a good leader of the Conservatives, against 35% who believe she would be a bad leader. For Robert Jenrick, one in six Britons (17%) think he would make a good leader, versus three in ten (31%) who think he would be a bad leader.

Like the wider public, Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem voters see both candidates in about the same terms, but Reform UK voters prove an exception. While they split evenly (28% to 29%) on whether Badenoch would make a good leader, they are roughly twice as likely to say that Jenrick would make a good leader (37%) as a bad leader (19%).

This is because Jenrick is committed to leaving the European convention on human rights, a policy which is very popular with Reform UK supporters. Badenoch has not ruled the idea out, but she says it would be a mistake to commit to that now, and she argues that it would be wrong to see ECHR withdrawal as an easy solution to the problem of irregular migration.

Good morning. Conservative party members have chosen a new leader and the winner will be announced shortly after 11am at an event in London. This has only happened four times before since William Hague changed the rules a quarter of century ago to ensure members, not MPs, take the final decision about who should be leader. The process has not always worked very well – there’s been a failure rate of at least 50%, conventional wisdom would say – which is one reason why Hague thinks his rule change has been a mistake.

The two obvious failures were Iain Duncan Smith, who was elected leader in 2001 but replaced after two years after MPs concluded he was not up to the job, and Liz Truss, who only lasted two months. The members’ decision to elect David Cameron in 2005 is generally seen as a good one, because he led his party back into power and won a second, surprise election victory. Members also voted for Boris Johnson in 2019; like Cameron, he also turned out to be an election-winner, but his record as PM was so dire, and caused such lasting reputational damage to the party, that it is arguable that this was a bad choice too.

This time members have had to choose between Kemi Badenoch, the former business secretary, and Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister. It is often assumed that the most rightwing candidate will always win in a Conservative leadership contest, and that helps to explain what happened with Duncan Smith and Truss; members chose the rightwinger when polling evidence said a more “centrist” rival would have been more popular with floating voters and the public at large. But this contest has been unusual in that both candidates on the final ballot were running as rightwingers. James Cleverly, the former foreign secretary and former home secretary, who was the leading “moderate” in the contest and who was the clear winner of the Conservative conference leadership “beauty contest”, was unexpectedly knocked out in the final ballot of MPs.

Badenoch is expected to win. There have not been any recent polls of members (polling is expensive, and media interest in the outcome of the contest is not exactly enormous) but the ConservativeHome website carries out surveys of party members which have always reliably predicted the winner in leadership contests and its last one, published on 25 October, said Badenoch was comfortably ahead. It had her on 55%, Jenrick on 31% and don’t knows on 14%.

My colleague Esther Addley has written profiles of the two candidates which are here.

Today I will be focusing almost entirely on the Tory leadership contest, although I may cover some other UK politics as well. The results are being announced at an event in London where Richard Fuller, the party chair, will say a few words, and Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 Committee, will unveil the winner. The new leader will then deliver a short speech.

At some point the new leader will have to appoint a shadow cabinet, but it is not clear yet when that will happen. One person, however, won’t be available; Cleverly has said he wants to stay on the backbenches. The revelation came in an article by Lucy Fisher, who interviewed him for her paper’s “Lunch with the Financial Times” feature slot. She writes:

[Cleverly] has voted in the leadership contest, but will not confirm whether he backed Badenoch or Jenrick. He resolutely refuses to critique — let alone criticise — either candidate, conceding only that he does not “always agree” with them.

All three indicated they envisaged a smaller state and lower taxes. But Cleverly did not share Badenoch’s crusade against “woke” ideology, while he diverged from Jenrick over his vows to quit the European Convention on Human Rights and to radically reduce net inward migration to “tens of thousands” of people annually.

While he insists he will do everything he can to ensure the victor is a “roaring success”, he reveals he will do so from the backbenches for now — he is not planning to serve in the next leader’s team as a shadow minister.

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