With one exception, the five candidates who choose to be Conservative leaders and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom got what they needed from the first televised debate of Friday’s contest.
Tom Tugendhat, who was declared the winner in an instant poll by Opinium Research, had to prove he is a potential election winner, and he did. Over the next week, MPs will vote to decide which two candidates will face the vote of party members, but before that there will be a second debate on Sunday, and their mission is to prove that their victory in the first was not. a unique one.
The problem with Tugendhat, however, is that it is not enough to succeed: others must fail. He needs Penny Mordaunt, whose votes he is in the best position to pick up, to take off in Sunday’s debate, but that’s something he can’t control.
As for Mordaunt herself, she entered the first debate by taking the light of her unexpected strength among the parliamentary party, but stubborn about questions about whether she has anything deep behind her. In the first debate, he did enough not to confirm these doubts.
Kemi Badenoch and Liz Truss are making opposite ends of the same bet. Badenoch’s hopes are based on looking like a more direct and articulate alternative for the right-wing party than Truss, and that helps him be free and able to criticize the outgoing government. She set out a clear and articulate case of why she should be the right-wing flag bearer.
Truss must maintain the support of Boris Johnson’s remaining allies in the media and the parliamentary party if he wants to stay in the top position to unite the Conservative right. On television, he managed to stay in that position by staying true to Johnson. His reward is the continued loyalty and support of much of the right-wing press, but it comes at a cost because the outgoing prime minister is now incredibly unpopular.
When the contest is over, one or both of Truss and Badenoch may end up looking alike as if they had chosen a bad strategy. It doesn’t make sense to have a strategy to unite the conservative right, as Truss has done, if you can’t stay in the contest long enough to do so. But it has no value having a strategy to supplant Truss as a right-wing candidate, as Badenoch does, if when the push comes, it actually makes it harder for you to unite the right.
But what unites Tugendhat, Mordaunt, Badenoch and Truss is that they cannot change their strategies now. For various reasons, they do not have an alternative strategy available. There is no way for Truss to join the right without staying loyal to Johnson, nor is there any way for Badenoch to jump it without jeopardizing his ability to join the right.
As a candidate with the smallest support base in the parliamentary party, Tugendhat can only wait for one of his rivals to implode. For Mordaunt, there is no way to demonstrate the depth that does not risk breaking the eclectic band of parliamentary supporters he has accumulated.
The same is not true of Rishi Sunak. The former rector’s performance in Friday’s debate was brilliant. He was clear, concise, and demonstrated exactly what his followers see in him. But he doesn’t have enough support to win: all polls suggest he will lose against whoever faces him in the final round. His biggest problem, I think, is that partners see him as a moderate tax collector.
Sunak’s strategy has too often resembled that of Ken Clarke: to tell Conservative members that, yes, they may disagree with him, but that it is their best chance of winning an election. This tactic ended in failure for Clarke in 1997, 2001 and 2005 and there is no reason to believe it will work better for Sunak.
But unlike Clarke, Sunak has an alternative, because while Clarke was really at odds with belonging to the single European currency, Sunak is not moderate. If he can take advantage of Sunday’s debate to remind Conservative members that he is, like most, an ideologically committed and ideologically driven Brexit, he could still find a way out as prime minister.
stephen.bush@ft.com