Newsletter #2: The Tory leadership contest’s real prize
PLUS: Dominic Cummings, James Cleverly, and Robert Jenrick
Good morning.
Our second newsletter comes hot on the heels of two rounds of voting in the Tory leadership contest. In the penultimate round, it looked like Jenrick was finished, falling back to second place, winning 31 votes — two less than in the previous round, in which he was in first place. Badenoch’s support increased to 30 votes; Cleverly surged into the lead, with 39 votes. After Tom Tugendhat was eliminated on 20 votes, with it (at least outwardly) looking unlikely that his supporters would go to Jenrick, it seemed nearly certain — minutes prior to the vote, betting markets gave him just an 8/1 chance of making it through (and we should remember that Tory insiders apparently like to bet on this sort of thing) — that Jenrick was out.
I was totally despondent. I got my credit card out, ready to finally purchase a Reform UK membership.
And yet, in a sudden twist, in the final round, Cleverly fell back by two votes, to 37. Jenrick surged to 41, just behind the dreadful Badenoch, on 42 — thus setting up a Jenrick vs Badenoch final. Reform will now have to wait a bit to get my money. What happened, and why should we care?
This newsletter’s agenda: The Tory leadership contest’s real prize (free); MISSING: Dominic Cummings (free); RIP James Cleverly, ‘normal-one-haver’ (paid); Robert Jenrick — is he the real deal? (paid).
The first and sections are free. Upgrade to a paid subscription — normally £8/month (or £80/year), but ten percent off for one year until the end of October, click here! — to read rest of this newsletter.
The Tory leadership contest’s real prize (or, avoiding another ‘A-list’ disaster)
It is a simple fact that whoever wins the Tory leadership election, even if they are more of a ‘continuity candidate’ (i.e., Michael Gove- and Dougie Smith-backed Kemi Badenoch), should be able to transform the party with ease.
Many will be thinking of (and celebrating) the potential for mass firings at CCHQ, the most rotten organ of the Conservative Party (and that’s saying something). It is certainly true that many roadblocks to internal reform at CCHQ have been removed as a result of the sheer scale of their defeat in 2024. Nonetheless, this would not be a transformation ‘with ease’: we should not underestimate the ability of the incumbents to dig their heels in. Successfully purging the party of its worst elements — even in a narrow, non-ideological sense — will require both the strategic competence to outmanoeuvre one’s enemies and the courage to persist despite the relentlessly hostile briefings and leaks that will inevitably accompany such a purge.
The real prize is not control over policy formation in opposition, or even control over CCHQ per se: it is control (or at least influence) over selections. As Georgia Strange, writing for the House of Commons Library, notes:
The 2024 general election produced a large rise in the number of very marginal seats (where the elected candidate won with only a small majority), compared with the most recent previous elections.
Nearly one in every five seats — 115 in total — was won by a margin of 5% or less of total votes cast. There were 48 more seats in this marginal category than at the 2019 general election.
Many of these ultra-marginal seats are, naturally enough, Labour seats. And, of the twenty most marginal seats, nine of them were Labour gains from the Conservatives in 2024, and a tenth was a Liberal Democrat gain from the Conservatives. The least marginal of these ten has a majority of just 495. All of these seats are almost certain goners next time, and even a vaguely acceptable performance by whoever becomes leader will cause the numbers of Labour seats at risk to go up very quickly indeed: by my count, there are forty-nine Labour MPs with a majority of less than 2,000 (and although the Tories are not in second place in all of these seats, they are in most).
As a result, a transformation of the Conservative Party will occur almost by default due to the sheer amount of churn, which forces enormous numbers of consequential selection decisions, with little or no confrontation with any incumbents strictly necessary (as no-one is getting fired, and the leader is expected to interfere with this sort of thing anyway). For while it is certainly not impossible that the Tories do worse than they did last time, this seems unlikely (especially under Jenrick): given how badly Labour are doing, this is probably only plausible if Reform perform exceptionally well over the next few years and the Tories fail to make any kind of deal with them in 2029. Thus far, with Nigel Farage looking physically tired and rhetorically clumsy, and with internal party management a mess, this does not seem likely. For better or for worse, the Tories — having fared better in 2024 than most expected — are probably at their low-water mark.
Let’s say that the Tories do badly at the next election, winning 225 seats. Add to this a few retirements and by-election wins, and this will mean that even if the Tories win only a couple dozen more seats than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, it will be very likely that a majority of Tory MPs in 2029 will have been selected by whoever wins the upcoming leadership election. And, owing to the sheer scale of their defeat, many of these new MPs will be representing constituencies that, in ordinary times, would be relatively safe. As such, so long as the Tories maintain any kind of upward momentum in the years after 2029, these MPs will be able to shape the Party for years, if not decades to come. Even if the next leader never makes it back to power themselves, they can potentially be hugely influential.
What should a party leader looking to shape the party through selections do? At an absolute minimum, the existing ‘candidates list’ should be burned (rumour is that Bella Wallersteiner is high up it), all implicit or explicit diversity quotas should be abolished, and much more rigid ideological screening (rather than just party loyalty tests and media training, which are currently the focus) should be put in place. One obvious — if somewhat tame — example would be making sure all new candidates pledge their support for leaving the ECHR: important not just for practical reasons, but as a wedge issue on the centre-right. Another tame, but easy thing to do would be to examine every new candidate’s views on transgenderism. While transgenderism is not in itself very important, an MP’s opinion on it is undeniably a useful signal of their views on other matters, as well as of their desire to please the bien-pensant, a problem that has plagued the Right for decades (see Penny Mordaunt). To speed up the process of churn, MPs who lost their seats in 2024 but want to run again should not be fast-tracked to selection before the appropriate checks have taken place.
The Conservative Party should also be intensely wary of those who have a basically ‘non-ideological’ explanation for why they got involved in politics; the sort of people who have few thoughts on tax or immigration, but have been passionately campaigning against a certain housing development, or to keep a hospital open. While this sort of story is fine for public consumption in the local constituency, some of the worst Conservative MPs (e.g., Sarah Wollaston) of the last fifteen years are of this type.
In terms of preventing personal scandals, the Party should just use their common sense. Usually, an MP’s inappropriate behaviour was already something of an open secret in Westminster before the scandal broke. Often, their behaviour was already known by the Party to be a problem even before they were selected. Putting a stop to the constant drip, drip of personal scandals will require a change in culture, starting at the very top. Obviously, the candidate backed by Dougie Smith is not the one to do this.
If this does not happen, we already know what the ‘Bad Ending’ is: David Cameron’s ‘A-list’, v2. In fact, due to the massive churn in Conservative MPs that is likely to occur between 2024 and 2029, it will be even more damaging than Cameron’s ‘A-list’, and even harder to undo.
Even if we (wrongly) ignore the many arch-mediocrities who won Cameron’s favour, the ‘A-list’ is still a damning indictment of his leadership. Some of those selected, while not especially personally objectionable (if we are being generous) or incompetent, were simply inappropriate on ideological grounds, even when we account for the fact that Brexit was obviously not foreseeable in 2010.
Among the known ‘A-listers’, we can count an astonishing number of future defectors. Some of them, such as the Brexit Party’s Annunziata Rees-Mogg (who has now rejoined the Conservative Party), and Reform UK’s David Bull, moved Right. But far more of the ‘A-list’ moved Left. These include Liberal Democrat defectors Sam Gyimah and Phillip Lee (the latter was especially ideologically unsuitable), ‘Independent Progressive Conservative’ defector Nick Boles, and Change UK defector Anna Soubry. Other MPs who proved to be awful choices for ideological reasons include Gavin ‘How to Win a Marginal Seat’ Barwell, Amber ‘Left the Party in 2019’ Rudd, Laura ‘Green New Deal’ Sandys, and George ‘Tory Glastonbury’ Freeman. Before Brexit forced them out (or at least onto the sidelines), many of these people had positions in government; all were consistently pushing the Conservative Party in the wrong direction.
Others were inappropriate for a whole host of other reasons. Louise Mensch was (and is) simply insane, and the signs were always there. Similarly, there is surely no way that the Party did not have an inkling as to the inappropriate behaviour of Mark Menzies — forced to resign as a PPS in 2014 for misconduct involving a Brazilian rent boy, and then permanently suspended in 2024 over the ‘misuse of party funds’ (widely speculated to be related to some kind of sexual blackmail) — prior to selecting him. While Andrew Griffiths’ behaviour was probably more difficult to predict (Griffiths resigned over sending thousands of sexually explicit messages to female constituents), we can also add him to the list of terrible ‘A-listers’.
Finally, we have the ethnic grifters. Some of those who found their way onto the ‘A-list’ partly for their ethnicity, while not especially competent, are also not especially objectionable. But two of them stand out as real stinkers. The first, and by far the more famous, is serial failure (and future defector) Sayeeda Warsi, inexplicably given a peerage after her second straight rejection by the electorate. Since then, she has been banging the drum for Gaza, and using her former position to help undermine right-wing politics in this country. Just as bad is the more obscure Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones (who wasn’t elected in 2010), also known as ‘The Black Farmer’, who has repeatedly endorsed anti-white rhetoric in the years following.
These people have harmed the Conservative Party immeasurably since 2010. Whoever wins the leadership must make sure that this never happens again.
MISSING: Dominic Cummings
Where is Dominic Cummings? On 9 September, he was supposed to launch his new ‘Start-up Party’ (or, as he sometimes calls it, ‘TSP’). A little over a month on, and we’ve still heard nothing (though someone spotted him changing, then changing back, his Substack description). Hopefully, no-one actually succeeds in bullying Cummings into going through with this idea, because it’s bad. (It seems to mostly involve having various people in ‘tech’ puppeteering ‘northern mums’ and ‘nurses’ to achieve something he calls ‘regime change’. What the constituency for this is, I have no idea.)
But if no ‘Start-up Party’, then what? Cummings does not seem like the sort of person who will just sit out the next five years of politics. Surely he’s planning something. He hates Farage, so that makes Cummings involving himself in Reform very unlikely. But what about the Tories?
So far, what has Cummings said on X about the main leadership candidates? Who does he like, and who does he not like? Is he actively supporting any of them? The answer to the second question is easy: not publicly. However, so far, he has mentioned three of the four final candidates by name.
On Tom Tugendhat, Cummings’ opinions are fairly easy to predict: he doesn’t like him. Cummings is, after all, a rare critic of Britain’s attitude towards the war in Ukraine. Tugendhat, by contrast, has distinguished himself by becoming one of the loudest and most extreme hawks in all of British politics. All the way back in 2022, Cummings took the following view of him:
Tugendhat clearly disqualified from any serious job by calling for expelling ‘all Russian citizens’. Extremely stupid. Extremely immoral. Actually [trolley emoji]-esque & we've had enough of this.
Ouch! That rules Tugendhat out.
On Kemi Badenoch, who is supported by his old boss, Michael Gove, he has (somewhat surprisingly) only posted once, writing that
…if you look at Kemi B, cheered by both the establishment Tories and self-identified ‘Thatcherites’, she focused in her campaign launch on a previous twitter battle with Dr Who... And this was seen as ‘good politics’ by her supporters…
So far the Tory leadership campaign is largely a continuation & demonstration of these trends, not a break with them... Which is partly why the wisest observers of Tory MPs are privately predicting >50% odds of yet another contest in 2026/7. Also why some of the wisest are predicting *seriously* the return of Boris in 26/7. This makes perverted sense given Tory pathologies...
So that presumably means that Badenoch is also ruled out.
On Cleverly, Cummings recently wrote the following, regarding the surrender of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius:
This came to my desk in No10. I said: tell the FO and Cabinet Office lawyers to fuck off, no way, no discussion. Boris in 2021 like on everything backtracked and started this surrender.
Cleverley [sic] took dictation like the perfect NPC-minister...
Given that ‘NPC’ (alongside ‘trolley’ and ‘Truss’) is one of the three worst insults in Cummings-speak, this presumably also rules out him supporting Cleverly.
That leaves only Robert Jenrick. Cummings has — thus far — conspicuously failed to mention Jenrick by name, which seems telling. There are also many reasons for why Cummings might like Jenrick. In particular, Jenrick — like Cummings — is a vehement critic of the ECHR. Jenrick, alone among the main candidates, has pledged that he will withdraw Britain from the ECHR outright if the Tories return to power with him as leader.
Is the reason for Cummings’ delay on the ‘TSP’ because he is waiting to see if Jenrick manages to win before making his next move? It’s certainly possible. Expect an update from him once the contest concludes.
RIP James Cleverly, ‘normal-one-haver’
That British politicians and commentators remain inappropriately obsessed with the United States — sometimes going as far as to outright copy from them, even when it makes no sense — is not a novel observation. A few weeks ago, JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, was branded by the Democratic media as ‘weird’ (this came alongside the brief, excruciating, ‘Kamala is brat’ phase). It is perhaps not entirely surprising, then, that some in the Labour Party, upon hearing about the new fashion in the metropole, decided to also brand Jenrick as ‘weird’ in order to try to discredit him in a similar way.
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