There was some excitement yesterday: Kemi Badenoch’s campaign was reported to be “slightly concerned” because this survey was “rumoured to be positive for Jenrick.”
Were there such rumours? Who knows. Perhaps, as some very excitable people suggested on Twitter (‘X’), ConHome towers had been hacked. Or maybe it was just expectation management. Either way, nobody had seen the numbers.
The actual result? Well, and entirely in keeping with the theme of this leadership contest (be very long but have nothing change), we’re roughly where we started.
Consider the first preferences (upon which the increases and decreases in the above chart are based, in line with previous surveys). In our first one all the way back in July, Badenoch led the pack with 26 points whilst Robert Jenrick had 13; today she leads by 55 to 31.
The raw numbers are obviously bigger as candidates have got knocked out, but both have put on about 20 points. That’s a better percentage increase for Jenrick, but overall a very good result for Badenoch, who managed to consistently gain supporters when that strong early position might simply have reflected more people having made up their minds about her.
But as we’re down to just the final two candidates, we can also compare this result to the head-to-head questions, which we ran in our August survey, our pre-conference survey, and the September survey. Behold:
Absent the noise created by the other candidates, the picture is essentially one of stasis: with the fleeting exception of the ‘Jenrick spring’ ahead of conference, when he cut Badenoch’s lead to just 13 points, she has been more or less 20 points ahead throughout. The seven-point increase isn’t nothing, but it’s nothing especially dramatic.
This does raise questions for CCHQ and the 1922 Committee, once the dust has settled. There are concrete downsides to having the contest run this long, most obviously not having the new team in place to respond to the Budget. Yet with the party threatening to crack down hard on any “blue-on-blue” attacks, the result was a long contest in which – with the sole exception of Party Conference – nothing happened.
Perhaps this explains why (somewhat ironically) our post-conference survey was the first one in which a plurality of members shifted to opposing the timetable of the contest; our latest one had the same result.
It’s also worth noting, despite the very long contest, how very little of it was given over to the final round, i.e. the choice that members will actually get to make. James Cleverly was knocked out just over two weeks ago; voting opened very soon after that, and closes in just a week’s time.
Again, this makes sense if the party’s main goal is avoiding a repeat of the long and bloody brawl between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss in 2022 – it’s much easier for all the candidates to stay positive in a crowded field. But there’s an obvious price to be paid in time allowed for members to properly scrutinise the candidates.
It’s especially odd to allocate over two months to the MP rounds, given that MPs had presumably had plenty of opportunities to get to know the hopefuls already. Next time we do this (not to jinx anything) a few weeks more for campaigning and proper scrutiny of the final two, and a few less for horse-trading and pratfall efforts at 4D chess, would be welcome.
