“Shall we take it one more time from the top?”
I’d imagine last night that phrase has been uttered within all four leadership contender’s weary camps. It certainly will this morning.
After a frenetic Conference for Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick the tiredness will be kicking in, but also for the teams of advisers who want, and maybe need, their principal to take another go at delivering the twenty-minute speech of their career.
It’s a four hoarse race.
Speech day is upon us. There is only one prize. The judging panel are still not the vast majority of the audience – and that prize won’t be handed out today. The people who really count remain just 119 individuals with egos, ambitions and nobody to answer to as to why they’ll make the choice they do next week.
Some have been promising everything to all the teams. One suspects some teams have promised things back – but has this Conference switched any MPs from where they were on the second ballot? In truth nobody knows, and given the secrecy of the ballots it might be that nobody will know.
Each leadership team tells me they ‘have the numbers’ – I begin to doubt they have complete certainty on that. In certain circumstances MPs will lie. Who knew?
In the corner of the bar at the Hyatt Hotel and on the Escher-esque staircases of the ICC here in Birmingham the big backroom players within in each leadership team have been spinning their narrative to people like yours truly. We speak with mutual earnestness but we know that for many in the public this entire race might as well be taking place on Mars – or BBC 4.
However, as it stands Robert Jenrick is ahead with MPs. Kemi Badenoch remains a favourite with members, and James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat quote a litany of polls that say the public know and trust them best.
On that point, it would seem odd, when picking a leader of a party against the backdrop of a wide but thin Labour majority for a Government and Prime Minister in a mess – that members should simply ignore the voters who really count in all of this – but then again, the voters that really count in all of this don’t have a vote until long after the winner is announced.
But that’s the nature of leadership elections in any Party. One party grandee reminded me members are not picking a Prime Minister here, but ‘someone who might best grow into the role‘ of Leader of the opposition.
Cleverly is clearly in no mood to wait: “if you want to mess about pick anyone. If you want to win, pick me” – but there are those for whom that sounds too much like continuity over real change, and he hasn’t convinced others whether “he really wants it”
Tugendhat is ‘ready to serve’ (he was a soldier you know) and whilst the party membership certainly seems unexpectedly buoyant and up for the fight – some are firm they don’t want to with him in charge.
Badenoch’s team think her more eye-catching comments show conviction and values, not a habit for turning bluntness on the media into media blunders. She’s the one of the four that’s carrying that Ming vase. She’s doing it more carefully now. She knows that if she makes the last two, her words on maternity pay might not end up being the slip up others are saying it definitely was.
And then there is Jenrick. Lesser known to the public, but who has the momentum with MPs, and has his support with members. His team has always been consistently focused on winning ‘against the odds’ and though he himself disputes it, they seem like they had a five month head start. However an ex-MP (not a fan) says:
“Anybody but him. He tries to look and sound the part, but knows deep down, he isn’t”
There are others who can’t quite buy into his political journey.
The problem for the Party, and for me, is that none of this gossipy chatter has taken the Conference attendees much further forward – nor has any of the four taken Conference by storm.
Most of those here are still without a chance to vote yet and instead are left either wearing the lanyard of their preferred choice – or wondering if their preferred choice is going to be left hanging by a third vote of MPs.
So, what is going on behind the scenes within the teams?
Team Badenoch are trying to show they can deftly catch the vase if it looks remotely like dropping – whilst telling anyone, ‘she says what she means and means what she says’ – unless she didn’t, in which case it was misunderstood.
In truth the vase has looked less wobbly since the headlines two days ago on maternity pay but her team know it wobbled enough that some here are imagining ‘what if it fell and smashed were she Leader?’.
Team Jenrick would prefer not to face her in the last two, as it would end up two visions on the right battling it out, in a membership race they could be behind in.
They’d be happier if not happy to face Cleverly but they’d do it and seem to think a runoff with Tugendhat might be the easiest win for them on ideological grounds. They are starting to sound cautiously optimistic.
If the contest so far has been by and large good natured, though, do not be fooled.
All these teams know how to play hardball, and the Jenrick team have some battle-hardened briefing-snipers who so far have just been assessing targets in their cross hairs but will happily take a shot if they felt it was valid.
Speaking of taking shots, was it unwise for Robert to suggest UK special forces kill rather than capture because of the ECHR? Is having a cap in your merchandise offer that has a slightly iffy slang double meaning – a blow to his chances?
Like the maternity pay line that gave birth to some bad headlines for Badenoch the margins of error or success in this race are so small that any defect, mistake, or minute win can be played out as making a difference, but perhaps in reality makes no difference at all.
The smartest watchers at this Conference, who are often dined in order to give their honest take on ‘the latest’ to a select audience- are simply not willing to say who might come out on top because it is that close.
Then there’s this fellow called Tom Cleverly.
Were he to exist, some suggest ‘there wouldn’t even be a contest.’
If a hybrid of the two men lying in joint third after the second ballot did exist, then Team Tugendhat and Team Cleverly might find, that despite the affection both have for each other personally – in vote terms; they might not inadvertently be risking killing each other off.
But ‘Tom has this’,‘but James has that’, is an argument both the other teams are very happy to let rage amongst those who do not want the final two to be both ‘on the right.’
Some speculate wildly that the four are offering promises of big posts in the future to get their numbers up. I’m sceptical. Frankly, there are no big posts in shadow cabinets, and with 119 MPs, in all likelihood – everyone gets a job.
Grant Shapps, a man with a plethora of jobs in a real Cabinet, currently doesn’t have a job, but at the launch of his new project, Conservatives Together, he spoke of the tiny margins of advantage that if accumulated can bring big change.
He meant a general election, but it’s hard to pinpoint if any of the four hopefuls have found a tiny margin of advantage this week – or any MPs who are willing to say if their preference has changed in the last two days.
So maybe it is down to those 20-minute speeches. 1200 seconds to avoid coming second in a race that can have only one winner.
As one of the contenders said at the ConservativeHome reception for the 1922 Committee on Sunday:
“Every single one of the people standing would make a fantastic leader of the party. I would make the best leader of the party”
They meant themselves of course – but it seems to sum up the pitch, the position and the predicament of all four, as we await them taking to the stage later today.
