James Cleverly Leads UK Tory Party Leadership Contest
(Bloomberg) -- Former Home Secretary James Cleverly surged to first from third in the latest round of voting for the UK Conservative leadership contest, in a sign that Tory Members of Parliament are rallying behind his appeal to make the party “more normal.”
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Cleverly gained 18 supporters to top the ballot on 39 votes out of the opposition party’s 121 MPs, while Tom Tugendhat received just 20 votes and was knocked out of the contest. Ex-Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick — who had won the previous two rounds of voting — earned 31 votes, down two, while former Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch gained two to place third on 30 votes.
The surge in support for Cleverly, seen as the most moderate of the three remaining contenders, suggests a large portion of Tory MPs are shunning the more divisive politics of Jenrick — who has vowed to leave the European Convention on Human Rights — and Badenoch, who recently criticized maternity pay, the living wage and civil servants.
At play is the future direction of the UK’s opposition party, which collapsed to its worst ever electoral defeat on July 4 after a chaotic five years during which it cycled through four prime ministers, including Boris Johnson’s scandal-riven tenure and a 7-week period under Liz Truss, during which she roiled the markets. Members are deciding between tacking to the right in the hope of winning back former supporters who opted for the anti-immigration Reform party in July, or seeking to appeal again to more centrist voters who defected to the Liberal Democrats and Labour.
That debate looks set to continue into the final round of the leadership contest, with the centrist Tugendhat’s supporters more likely to rally behind Cleverly than to back his two rivals on the right of the party. That would leave Badenoch and Jenrick scrapping it out to avoid elimination in the next vote on Wednesday. After that, the two remaining contenders will battle to win the favor of the wider Conservative Party membership, with results of that final vote due to be announced on Nov. 2.
Cleverly’s third-round performance suggests he won over all the backers of Mel Stride and more. Stride was eliminated in the last round of voting before publicly backing the former home secretary, who also held the post of foreign secretary before that.
Luke Tryl, UK director of think tank More in Common, said there was “major momentum” behind Cleverly, adding that it was “also significant that Jenrick has actually lost votes between the two ballots.”
“If Badenoch can secure a few Tugendhat backers it could be a Cleverly-Badenoch final two,” he said on the social media platform X.
The winner will succeed former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as leader of the Tories and then face the unenviable task of uniting the opposing factions of a Tory party riven by years of infighting. Those divisions became clear at the Conservatives’ annual conference earlier this month — Jenrick’s tough-on-migration sound bites won applause from delegates, but so did Cleverly’s appeal for the party to be “enthusiastic, relatable, positive, optimistic.”
A more moderate Tory party could be a concern for Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose popularity with the British public has been slipping since his landslide victory in July’s general election. Polling from More in Common published on Tuesday found Labour was leading the Tories by just one percentage point when the public was asked which party they would vote for. The gap was 10 points in the general election, before Labour became mired in rows over a planned cut to winter fuel payments to pensioners and for accepting freebies while in opposition.
(Updates with detail, comment starting in third paragraph.)
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