With one exception, all five candidates running for Conservative leader and UK prime minister got what they needed from the first televised debate in the race on Friday.
Tom Tugendhat, who was declared the winner of an Opinium Research poll, had to prove that he was a potential winner of the election, and he did. MPs will vote next week to decide which two candidates will face the party members’ vote, but before that there will be a second debate on Sunday and his mission then is to demonstrate that his victory in the first was not a one-off.
Tugendhat’s problem, however, is that it is not enough that he succeeds: others must fail. He needs Penny Mordaunt, whose votes he is best placed to take, to get out of Sunday’s debate – but that is something he cannot control.
As for Mordaunt herself, she entered the first debate basking in the glow of her unexpected power among the parliamentary party, but dogged by questions about whether she had anything substantial behind her. In the first debate, she did enough to avoid having those suspicions confirmed.
Kemi Badenoch and Liz Truss make opposite ends of the same bet. Badenoch’s hopes rest on being seen as a more straight-talking and articulate alternative to the party’s right than Truss, and it helps that she is free and able to criticize the outgoing government. She made a clear and well-articulated argument for why she should be the standard bearer of the right.
Mr Truss must retain the support of Boris Johnson’s remaining allies in the media and the parliamentary party if he is to remain on top to unite the Conservative right. On television, she was able to stick to that position by remaining loyal to Johnson. Her reward is the continued loyalty and support of much of the right-wing press, but this comes at a price as the outgoing prime minister is already incredibly unpopular.
When the race is over, one or both of Truss and Badenoch may look like they picked a bad strategy. There’s no point in having a right-wing Tory unification strategy like Truss has if you can’t stay in the race long enough to do it. But there’s no value in having a strategy to displace Truss as a candidate on the right, as Badenoch is doing, if when push comes to shove it actually makes it harder to unify the right.
But what unites Tugendhat, Mordaunt, Badenoch and Truss is that they cannot change their strategies now. For various reasons, they have no alternative strategy available. There is no way Truss can unite the right without remaining loyal to Johnson, and no way Badenoch can leapfrog her without jeopardizing her ability to unite the right.
As the candidate with the least support in the parliamentary party, Tugendhat can do nothing but hope that one of his rivals falls apart. There is no way for Mordaunt to demonstrate depth without risking fracturing the eclectic group of parliamentary supporters she has amassed.
The same is not true of Rishi Sunak. The former chancellor’s performance in Friday’s debate was brilliant. It was clear, concise, and demonstrated exactly what his supporters saw in him. But he doesn’t have enough support to win: every poll shows he’ll lose to whoever faces him in the final round. I think his biggest problem is that members see him as moderate in tax collection.
Sunak’s strategy has too often resembled that of Ken Clarke: telling Conservative members that yes, they may not agree with him, but he is their best chance of winning an election. This tactic failed for Clarke in 1997, 2001 and 2005, and there is no reason to believe it will work any better for Sunak.
But unlike Clark, Sunak has an alternative, because while Clark was indeed opposed to membership of the single European currency, Sunak is not a moderate. If he can use Sunday’s debate to remind Conservative Party members that he is, like most of them, a committed and ideologically driven Brexiteer, he may yet find a way to emerge as prime minister.
stephen.bush@ft.com
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