Coffee House Shots
Tory leadership race latest: who's declared?
The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis and unrivaled books and arts reviews. Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online. Along with the £320 John Lewis or Waitrose voucher, go to spectator.co.uk/voucher. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Seal and I'm joined today by the Spectator's Katie Pauls and Paul Goodman, Conservative Peer and Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange. Now Katie, we have just had the nominations formally opened last night. Already we've got two candidates, Tom Tugener and James Cleverley. I'm expecting more in the coming days. Tell us more. The contest has begun. Is the nation excited? I think that question is yet to be answered. But of course, this is the first story that you should contest in sometime, which is for an opposition leader, not for a prime minister. And therefore, I think that there will of course be media interest, particularly because Labour, I think, want to quietly get on with lots of their government plans. But I think some of these candidates who have seen recent contests play out would probably have to get used to the fact that this is a little bit less, you know, the first item on the news agenda in the way I think some of the past contests where I respect who was actually going to lead a government. In terms of what we're looking at so far, there are no big surprises. We have three candidates out in the open. James Cleverley, who went first, Tom Tugener who announced last night, both Cleverley and Tugenerley took the telegraph route. I think you'll see a lot of that as a newspaper which have the highest number of Tory members as far as we understand it. And then we also have Robert Genrich, whose team have announced today that he, they've almost gone for a bit of a stealth announcement, and simply saying that they will be putting in their nomination paper this morning, which is of course confirmed that they have the 10 names. Now, perhaps that's a flex in the sense that both Tom Tugener and James Cleverley have been talking about entering the race and talking about what they wanted to do. But they have not yet confirmed that they have hit those 10 numbers. And what I found interesting yesterday, walking around Parliament where, of course, because the Tory party is diminished in size, the votes of one Tory MP is even more important. So you're seeing all these Tory MPs being accosted or having their phones ringing, which is clear leadership teams. But I had initially thought, and this is partly because this was a view of some of the leaders team, the threshold was so low that it would make it very easy for lots of people to enter the race. Some of the teams are actually struggling to get to 10. Therefore, we know who I think, I think we can broadly say everyone we think wants to enter the race. And so you add to the names already out there, you can add Cami Badernock, who I think has seen as the front runner, Priti Patel, you can add Mel Stride. Mel Stride's team are confident they will get the 10. Kevin Hollingwright apparently is thinking about it, but does not yet have the numbers. And you'll get a few names like that. And of course, there's a question mark of us throughout a Bravoman. But I think the fact that Danny Kruger is the campaign manager for Robert Genrech, which we had expected, but it just does, of course, raise a question of would still have a Bravoman go for it now. In the sense, does she, you would have a sense for no, well, not you could get those names because you have a clear person going after the same patch of MPs. So I think that we obviously have the deadline now all the way till Monday. I think that, you know, for some candidates, it's going to be scrapping to just get those final couple of names on the list. And Cami Badernock, I think, will have the 10. But because you are the favorite in many ways, it's almost in your timing when you want to come out and do these things. So I think we've got a combination in terms of the delay of some who just don't have the numbers yet and want to be careful about it. And some who, when they do announce, wanted to be in a certain way or so to have the momentum in the race. Yeah, I remember in 2022, I think Liz Truss's team launched multiple times to get the kind of hit from the publicity you get from doing different big announcements and press conferences over different days. Paul, there's been two candidates who've launched snazzy new websites, public launches that Katie was talking about there, James Cleverly and Tom Tugenat, talk us through their chances and the pitches they're making and whether both will actually make it to that kind of first round of voting, which happens at the beginning of September. So, first of all, a declaration of interest, because after all, I'm a conservative party member and I'm in Parliament, which is, I'm not tied up to supporting anyone. So I'm coming to this with as clean a pair of hands as I can have. So, this reminds me very much of the last few conservative leadership elections, where there were a fantastic number of names floating around early on. And I said then it's kind of Andy Warhol leadership election that everyone's famous for 15 seconds or 15 minutes, I can't remember which. And last time, there were these names of John Barron, Raymond Kishty, Jesse Norman, who floated his case, I remember, on a website. And we're very much at that stage with people like Kevin Hollingrake, who, you know, apparently putting their names around, and other people like Victoria Atkins, whose names were strongly punted, now telling us that, hey, they were never actually going to stand after all. And I think there will be a sort of parrot within the next few days and weeks, who the really serious runners are, that we must get used to the numbers being very small with only 121 conservative MPs. I mean, these bands of support will be absolutely tiny. And as with this morning, James Cleverley was the sharp runner with two supporters. Katie, yeah. I mean, so talk us through how the kind of dynamics this contest are going to work really. I mean, 10 names. And I think that some of the people we've been talking about in this podcast, people that came about and not, for instance, should be able to get it. Do you think there'll be kind of, then the strategies will be used will be people trying to do a kind of 2015 Corbin style thing about sort of broadening the debate at all, or will it be about sort of locking down as many people as possible? How do you think they'll kind of play out the next five days or so as we reach that Monday 230 deadline in order to get beyond the ballot and threshold? So I think, as mentioned, you will have MPs just trying to say lend me your name because I'm on about seven. And why not have this policy debate? And as of yet, there was no candidate that is particularly Corbinite who is struggling to get on the ballot. You don't have, you know, that's what Sue Alexander-Bravlin does. She would probably be according to some MPs in the party, the closest thing to a Tory version of Jeremy Corbyn, because they think it might take the party in a strict direction that other way, potentially a reform merger. But we don't yet know what she is doing. So I think that is one to watch. But otherwise, I mean, in the nicest way possible, I don't think Kevin Hollingrake entering the race and mustering, you know, vote from the Tory version of Margaret Beckett, who let her vote to Jeremy Corbyn, is going to add, you know, an extra level of spice that is going to take this leadership contest in a way we had never expected. I think that the favourites are the favourites for a reason. And Robert Generick, Kenny Badernock, probably James Cleverley, and Tom Teakat, who you can assume in the most ahead, Priti Patel did have momentum. How's she got it now? Different people say different things, but let's see that. I think what's probably the most interesting thing today is looking at the pictures so far. I mean, I think we can hear a few clips now, Tom Teakat's media round. I'm standing to lead the Conservative Party back to government. That means being honest with ourselves and the country. We need to recognise where we failed. We said we'd cut taxes and they went up. We said we'd cut immigration. It went up. We let people down. We lost their trust. We fought amongst ourselves instead of delivering for the British people. I've got a track record of delivering whether that's on operations in the military in Afghanistan or Iraq, or whether that's standing up to dictators in parliament, as you know, got me sanctioned by China and Russia and Iran. You would be pursuing leaving the ECHR. Look, I'm prepared to make any decision that is in the interests of the British people. I'm prepared to make any decision that recognises that situations have changed, that times have changed and that organisations that we once part of no longer work for. So you had this slightly strange thing where the telegraph splashed on Tom Teakat saying that he was ready to leave the ECHR and yet in the various interviews he has done since then, he doesn't seem to actually want to say that. Now, he seems to be adopting to me the Rishi C net position, which is saying, of course we'll leave the ECHR if it does not work for us. We won't have the UK undermined or restrained what it can do, but it's a really complicated question, so I don't want to get in it right now. Now, headlines do not always match pieces as we ourselves as journalists would know very well. The classic thing, and we'll ever say to you, I didn't write the headline, but I think it does just probably make clear one of the struggles Tom Teakat is going to have, because you can see even the way he wrote in the telegraph. Also, he was claiming that, you know, actually the conservatives agree on so much already, defense, gender, tax. I don't think that is really the case in the sense, if you think about lots of the problems Rishi C net and his predecessor of that is because of disagreements in these areas. And therefore, I think attention across several of the campaigns is going to be talking about how you're a unifier. If you want to talk as though you're a unifier, both Tom Teakat and James Cleverly are doing, you then get in a tricky place that you get to pin down on policy positions, which will then divide something of your party and make it harder to say you're a unifier. But then if you don't really get tied down into anything and you just try and use warm words, you don't come across as a very substantial politician. So I think you can see in the campaign this attempt to say, I know you're going to all say I'm a one nation cuddly Tory who cannot bring back reform voters or beat, you know, Kami Baden, I quote, generic in the final two. But actually, I'm willing to say these things to the ECHR. The question is, once you scratch the surface a bit, is it actually what he is saying? And of course, Paul, you know, one of the great tensions in the last Tory government was Katie rightly identifies this difficulty between keeping the 2019 electoral coalition together, which is that the red wall areas of the North who were sometimes perhaps unfairly, but we'll talk about more sort of leveling up spending, public spending in that part there. But then there were also the kind of blue wall areas which traditionally want that low tax conservative message. I mean, do you think perhaps there is a danger that if we kind of pretend that this is not about policy, we do miss some of the key fundamental tensions that proved to be such a running solve for the last conservative government? Policy is key to the election. Lots of people are quite resistant to that sort of idea because they find policy dull and think that presentation values in quotes and your life story matter more. But if you come on stuck on policy, it can derail your campaign. And this ruling was a very interesting instance of something that can happen when a politician's agenda and media reporting don't always align. So the Telegraph headline, which was Tugenhart says, I'm ready to leave these THR well, what do you mean by that? The Sky News headline was prepared to, which was a slightly more medium-term, low-term word, which was actually what Tom Tugenhart was saying. But because the Telegraph has used the word ready, Tugenhart's already being attacked for a party rowing back from a position that he didn't actually take. And hey, this is the danger of leadership elections. You can get derailed by this sort of collision between your policy and the reporting. And Paul, I mean, you've been a former Conservative MP. I mean, there was an interesting line in the Conservative home about today talking about soundness and sort of actually how misleading this Tory notion of soundness and, you know, being a wet or a dry can stand. I mean, how do you think Conservative MPs, when they're making these calculations about who's part of their wing, who represents their values, what do you think of the factors that go into it? Because, you know, on the one hand, I can see the kind of argument, say, for instance, about Robert Genrich that sort of Braden will make that, yes, he was a one-nationer, pro-remainer, who, of course, back Rishi Sunak. But on the other hand, of course, he's been saying very different things recently. How credible is it these kind of candidate pitches where they pretend to be, or they say what they were wrong in the party when other colleagues think they're of their different type of ideological bent? Very often, I think the candidate's thinking of the members, and I think it is broadly true that most of the time, if you put two candidates in front of the members, the members will vote for the one who they think is the more, in quotes, the right wing. Unquote. It's not always true, it didn't happen in 2005, but it's usually true. MPs, it's slightly different. I think the main consideration for MPs is nearly always, and it's all the more so when an election is approaching, who is going to save my seat? Who's going to ensure I come back to Westminster and do another five years? Now, because the next election is, we think, a long way away, MPs will be a bit less motivated by that at the moment. They will be not only thinking who can save my seat, they will be thinking, yeah, who can recover the party's fortunes more? Who is more likely to appeal to the voters? And it's actually kind of the voters in my seat. And where I started with this election, MPs are always thinking about their seats and their constituencies and hanging on and/or increasing their majorities. Katie, I mean, I know it's a very early stage, but you've had lots of conversations with different MPs. I mean, is there a sense at this early stage about who would be the kind of best playing with the public? Or is it the case, perhaps, that the Tory party getting one of its worst-ever vote shares and results, et cetera, that we're at the floor? And actually, it could be a different type of debate in the future. I think the problem is every leadership team can get a poll which says their candidate is best in some way. So over the past few days, I've seen polling saying, "Tom, too, you can hat. He's the winner with the country." There's also been polling suggesting James Cleverley is. Some are saying with members, some of these other candidates have run for you. The most consistent trend has been Cami Beijnot as well with the membership. So while there are some other polls coming in on Robert Genwick doing well with the membership, you know, I think there is a reason people will keep saying Cami Beijnot is the most established candidate. Now, I think what it does point to is this contest could be a bit more close than some of the previous ones. So using about 2019 Boris Johnson, so if you think about the lead contest that followed Theresa May stepping down, it was very clear early on that if Boris Johnson could get through the parliamentary rounds and he could get to the membership, he would, you know, barring a very big disaster win. And even then, as soon as he got through the parliamentary round, he did have a very tricky story in the paper within days involving a fight to personal matters, a lot of the team were very worried about, and he still got through the membership. And I think this time around, you would say if Cami Beijnot gets to the membership, she has, you know, a very good chance. But I also think if it was Cami Beijnot versus Rob Genwick, I think that if you, you know, I think it's harder to say completely which way the membership is going to go. There's also some are saying, oh, well, actually the membership could be more one nation than people think because some have gone to reform. I mean, speak to MPs and they will say over the past couple of months, you know, since the election just before it, they had more members joining their associations, which they took to be a sign that actually these were people, you know, perhaps the conservative democratic organization, that pro-Boris Johnson group, that there was, you know, something about people wanting to join to have a say in this contest. And, you know, from just a few phone calls, so this is fairly anecdotal, I joke that they took these new members to be one nation, Tom Tegan, one of these. So, so we'll see where the membership goes. I think it's probably a bit closer than people think. I think what's quite funny is because the party is now so small. Some of the really big shadow jobs, of course, might go to the person you back, but it's not as though you're not going to get a job because you didn't back the right candidate. I mean, there's so few Tory MPs, most are going to be doing more than one brief. I mean, some of the jobs will probably be pretty undesirable, but there's less of that in it, in terms of being the winning team. Of course, if you want to be shadowed chance to run these senior roles and you want to be, you want to be attached to the team now. But I think it just means there's a slightly different calculation. I'll go back to Paul's point, which is, I think, you know, it's thinking a lot more, well, I somehow saw my majority of 20,000 go down to 800, so I need a candidate. And the hope is that is the rock bottom, but in life, things not to be really cheery on a set. Things can always get worse. You know, who can move my majority up to a more safe space? And I think that's what people are thinking more of at the moment. And there, I think that, you know, I've spoken to some who are backing Mel's stride because I think he's a safe pair of hands. The argument for Kemi Bajanog is, I think, if you imagine her on a stage, and you have Nigel Farage one side and Kia Starmer on the other, I think we've been that debate, and please think that she could take both two tasks, would Robert Jenner be able to do that? That's the question some MPs are asking. Would he look as, you know, someone who'd always be outflanked by Nigel Farage despite moving to the right? So I think it's those type of calculations that are going on at the moment in terms of judging it, but there's no perfect candidate. And that's why I think there's, you know, I don't think you, well, first off, I don't think Tory MPs have got keen on betting after recent events, but generally speaking, I don't think you'd want to bet too much either way on what's going to happen. It's because it could be a bit unpredictable still to come. And this is the final question, Paul. I mean, we've got this scenario where we're going to have the deadline for Monday. Every candidate who gets ten names can then go forward. There's then a month before the voting at the beginning of September. What's going to be happening then? Are they going to be around the association in terms of trying to canvas and get support among the members in the hope, perhaps, that those members can then, you know, be persuaded to convince their MP to back and maybe switch and back one of the leading candidates. Do you think that'll happen with sort of lots of endless tea parties and kind of debates and hustings, et cetera, to try and put all the candidates together and get the membership to kind of convince MPs to back someone? A campaign is well organized and it's got enough money. It will try to get to the members before the membership stage. That's correct. They'll try to get the members to lobby the MPs so they get through the MPs round and go before the members. And I'm not sure they've got the infrastructure to do that. I mean, look at this stage. You have to say, "Great podcast clicades. The race is wide open." I think we possibly know who's going to get through these very small numbers in the Conservative Parliamentary Party to get in that final ballot and we really don't know what the members will do at the end of it. I share the view put by Katie, I think, may have been you or may have been both of you, that Kenny Baderock is the favourite, but he's quite an excitable candidate and it could either be a huge success or she could someway blow up or we will have to see. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Katie, and thank you for listening to Coffee Our Shots. [Music]