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 the Labour Party, will the movement continue its radical drift or will it return more to the centre, abandoning its obsession with migration and the populist overtones of the Brexiteers? We will have to wait until early November to begin to find an answer to this question, when the future leader of the Tories will be appointed, whose personality will be decisive. On Wednesday 4 September, after a first round of eliminatory voting among the party’s MPs, five candidates were still in the running to become the number one opponent of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Priti Patel, Boris Johnson’s former home secretary who was also a candidate, was clearly eliminated.
They are all former ministers under Rishi Sunak: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat and Mel Stride. “At the moment, none of them are very well known to the general public”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 Conservative leaders since 2016 (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak).
It is up to the 121 members of the Conservative parliamentary group in the House of Commons, the 121 survivors of the 4 July disaster, to decide between the candidates in successive ballots, at the end of which only two will remain. Then it will be the turn of some 170,000 members of the Conservative Party to decide among themselves by postal vote.
“Despair” and “anger”
Of the five candidates, Tom Tugendhat, 51, former Secretary of State for Security, is the most moderate and the only one who dares to make a harsh diagnosis of the successive Conservative governments since 2010. For this former member of the British army, who served during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who launched his campaign on Tuesday, the party “owes an apology” to the British who deserved a government ” serious “ while the latter, with the “partygate” (the parties organised in Downing Street during the Covid-19 epidemic), gave them “disrespectful” “. Tugendhat even claimed to have observed the conduct of the last Conservative government (that of Rishi Sunak, of which he was a member). “with a mixture of desperation and rage”.
Kemi Badenoch, 44, also criticised the Conservative cabinets she was also a member of, holding the trade portfolio, in 2023 and 2024, but criticised their positioning, which she said was not correct enough. “They spoke from the right but acted from the left”he accused on Monday, promising, if he takes over the party presidency, to turn it into a movement. “Who is not afraid of being conservative”Combative and quick to respond, this member of the radical pro-Brexit wing loves to fight on the grounds of “wokeism”, which she denounces, and is often the first to react on gender issues, to reaffirm her biological character.
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