The battle for Rishi Sunak’s succession and the future political direction of the British Conservative Party has begun. After suffering its worst electoral defeat against Labour, will the movement continue its radical drift or return more to the centre, abandoning its obsession with migration and the populist overtones of the Brexiters? We will have to wait until early November to begin to answer this question, when the future leader of the Tories will be designated, whose personality will be decisive. On Wednesday, September 4, after a first round of elimination voting among the party’s MPs, five candidates remained in the running to become the number one opponent of the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. Priti Patel, Boris Johnson’s former home secretary, who was also a candidate, was decisively eliminated.
All are former ministers under Rishi Sunak: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat and Mel Stride. “None of them are well known to the general public at the moment.”warns Luke Tryl, director of the polling institute More in Common. On the other hand, the selection process should be more familiar to the British, who have seen five different Tory leaders since 2016 (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak).
It will first be up to the 121 members of the Conservative parliamentary group in the House of Commons, the 121 survivors of the July 4 disaster, to decide between the candidates in successive votes, at the end of which only two will remain. Then it will be the turn of the approximately 170,000 members of the Conservative Party to decide between them by postal vote.
“Despair” and “anger”
Of the five candidates, Tom Tugendhat, 51, a former Secretary of State for Security, is the most moderate and the only one to dare to make a severe diagnosis of the successive Conservative governments since 2010. For this former member of the British Army who served during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who launched his campaign on Tuesday, the party “owes an apology” to the British who deserved a government ” serious “ while the latter, with “partygate” (the parties organized in Downing Street during the Covid-19 epidemic), has “disrespectful” “Mr Tugendhat even assured that he had observed the conduct of the last Tory government – that of Rishi Sunak, of which he was a member – “with a mixture of despair and anger”.
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Kemi Badenoch, 44, also took aim at the Conservative cabinets – of which she was also a member, with the trade portfolio, in 2023 and 2024 – but to criticise their positioning, which she said was not right-wing enough. “They spoke right but acted left”she accused on Monday, promising that if she takes the head of the party, she will make it a movement “who is not afraid to be conservative”Combative and quick to repartee, this member of the radical pro-Brexit wing loves to fight on the ground of “wokism”, which she denounces, and she is often the first to react on questions of gender, to reaffirm her biological character.
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