At first, the candidates kept coming. Just hours after Boris Johnson resigned, Tom Tugendhat and Suella Braverman became the first hopefuls to declare, with the former promising, for the first of many times, “a clean start”. But the ensuing battle, in the heat of summer, was anything but.
Eleven people testified at the outset, including puzzlingly Rehman Chishti, who had been junior foreign minister for less than a week. He withdrew because he had no supporters when nominations closed. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps and former Health Secretary Sajid Javid also crashed at the first hurdle, with neither getting 20 MPs to nominate them.
It was a surprise in Javid’s case. The man whose resignation had prompted Johnson’s departure had already announced he would scrap the recent 1.25% rise in National Insurance, only for several other sources to insist he had argued to the government for it to be 2%
The party’s traditional left-right distinctions appeared to be irrelevant when Jeremy Hunt, a former runner-up and wet Tory, announced that Brexiteer Esther McVey would be his deputy. But he was kicked out in the first round of voting, as was Nadhim Zahawi, who had become chancellor a week earlier, only to campaign for Johnson to quit within a day or two of taking office.
Zahawi had previously denounced personal attacks against him in a statement: he had not been investigated by the Serious Fraud Office, he said, and had not benefited from an offshore trust. “It’s very sad that this kind of defamation has to be spread,” he added, although it was not enough to prevent him from finishing second to last with 25 votes to Hunt’s 18, both below the 30 threshold needed to continue
By now the contest was moving along at the pace of a Japanese or perhaps British game show as former Splash candidate Penny Mordaunt, junior trade minister and former defense secretary, became the most talked about candidate having taken an impressive second. with 67 votes behind race leader Rishi Sunak on 88 and an unexpectedly under-performing Liz Truss on 50.
At Westminster there was talk of Tory MPs being “anyone but Rishi” or “anyone but Liz” and Mordaunt appeared to benefit with his leadership campaign being launched under the curious slogan that it was “less about the leader and more more about the ship.” “. A Conservative House poll of party members also put Mordaunt at the top of the popularity list, suggesting he could win.
A panic-stricken right wing of the party struggled to find a standard-bearer. Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg backed Liz Truss, with the latter attacking Sunak as Chancellor of High Tax. Braverman, heavily backed by key Brexiters such as Steve Baker, refused to stand down, with one ally sending a Venn diagram to a reporter, arguing that, unlike Truss, the attorney-general was “strong on Brexit”. Braverman, however, was next as the contest headed to the TV studios and into the weekend.
The eight Tory leader candidates (clockwise from left): Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch, Nadhim Zahawi, Suella Braverman, Liz Truss, Tom Tugendhat and Jeremy Hunt. Photograph: Getty Images
Tugendhat, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee with no government experience, came out strong in the debate on Channel 4 on Friday night. He won applause from the studio audience when he declared that he was the only candidate who did not vote for the rise in national insurance “and now it seems that everyone agrees with me”.
It was the line of an opposition politician and it would never be enough for the governing party; it was eliminated the following Monday.
But the personal attacks reached an extraordinary level on Sunday night during a no-holds-barred debate on ITV, where each contestant was allowed a question. Sunak asked Truss: “You’ve been both a Liberal Democrat and a Remainer. I’m just wondering which one did you regret the most? Truss had previously accused Sunak of ‘raising taxes to the highest level in 70 years’ .
Workers were stunned by the ITV debate as they watched it unfold and the ammunition it had delivered. A minute-long attack ad prepared by the opposition, which only features quote after quote from the contenders in the debate, has attracted more than 3 million views online. The damage had already been done when Sunak and Truss pulled out of a Sky News debate scheduled for Tuesday.
Such was the Conservative party’s desire to do something new after 12 years in government that Kemi Badenoch, a little-known young minister, came forward strongly. As a candidate eager to fight culture war issues, it was no surprise that she targeted Mordaunt on the issue of trans rights.
Last weekend, Badenoch accused her rival of not understanding that she was supporting changes to gender recognition policy that could have led to the removal of medical requirements before the transition was legally recognised. “I won’t call her a liar,” Badenoch said in an interview, without too much subtlety, although Mordaunt insisted he had never supported self-identification despite his rivals saying otherwise.
Badenoch, however, was next Monday, leaving just three. Now Mordaunt was in trouble. The trade minister had come under repeated personal attacks, from the Truss-supporting Daily Mail, and more publicly from her boss, the trade secretary Anne Marie-Trevelyan, who accused Mordaunt of being a part-time minister, so focused on a future leadership campaign. that colleagues regularly “took the pieces”.
By then Westminster had concluded that it was Truss who had the late momentum, with Mordaunt painted to the left on social issues. When the heat finally began to die down, there was no surprise when it emerged that the Foreign Secretary had joined Sunak in the bottom two, climbing to 113 votes, eight ahead of Mordaunt.
It was, former Brexit secretary David Davis said, the “thickest campaign” he had ever seen. The veteran MP, a disappointed Mordaunt supporter, added: “The truth is we are selecting the next UK Prime Minister, which should be done with rationality and democracy, not dirty tricks.”
But as the contest shifts to Tory members, will voters forget a group of candidates so eager to wipe the record of the government and others?