Register your campaign website
You’ll need to move quickly once you’ve declared yourself a candidate for the leadership race. The first round of voting will take place less than a week after the Prime Minister has resigned, and you don’t want to be caught out. It is best to have a fully prepared domain name and website material. Readyforrishi.com, since its inception as ready4rishi.com, was registered in December last year. Maybe it was a little too soon. It’s hard to complain, although that didn’t stop Rish! – You have been surprised by the events and you have only recently decided to stand up when you have been waiting for the day for more than six months. Everyone knows you’ve been desperate for the top job, but it’s bad form to appear too impatient. Optics are everything.
Activate the leadership contest
Stating the obvious, but you can’t have a leadership contest until the previous prime minister has resigned. This proved problematic with Boris Johnson, as he is so narcissistic and corrupt that he refused to back down long after most normal people had realized the game was up. Once the leadership contenders realized there was no chance Johnson would resign of his own volition, it became a cat-and-mouse game to see who would move against him first. The downside of forcing him out was that you risked appearing disloyal; the upside was that you could set the agenda and appear to have a few moral principles. Not always an advantage in the Tory party. At the event Sajid Javid and Rish! did the dirty work by giving up within 10 minutes of each other on the afternoon of July 5th. They tried to claim that their resignations were not coordinated, but it seemed odd that they both had resignation letters prepared. Rish! he claimed he was resigning over a disagreement over economic policy, presumably over Johnson’s planned tax cuts. Which suggested that it was completely fine for Johnson to be a serial liar about Partygate and ignore the repeated accusations that the attached chief whip was a sex blight. However, we all have our breaking point.
Rishi Sunak launched his campaign for the leadership of the Conservative party several months after first registering the campaign website. Photo: Alberto Pezzali/AP
Make sure you’re in the country…or not
It was almost certainly no coincidence that Liz Truss, Rish!’s main rival, was outside a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Indonesia when she handed in her resignation letter, giving her at least two days of ‘advantage over her. Truss flew straight back from Indonesia without any of the other G19 ministers noticing he wasn’t there. That’s Global Britain for you. Fortunately for Liz, Johnson still managed to hang on for a couple of days, even with over 50 ministers quitting, so his own leadership campaign wasn’t too awkward. And she could legitimately claim that she was the continuity candidate and had nothing to do with the coup against Johnson.
Make a campaign video
For the laughs, if nothing else. No one could tell if Penny Mordaunt’s was a joke or meant to be taken seriously. Against a soundtrack of I Vow to Thee, My Country and a voiceover from Little Britain, the Mordaunt team took us on a journey through Englishness. This included murderer Oscar Pistorius and murdered Labor MP Jo Cox. Rish! he chose to tell us a story and just put us to sleep. Truss gave us a whirlwind tour of his Instagram account as he posed with other politicians in front of ever-larger union flags. Grant Shapps kept it short and sweet. I had no other message than to the parliamentarians: I would say anything to make them eligible. Although, unfortunately, he could not become eligible. Tom Tugendhat only promised to be the opposite of Johnson, who was the kiss of death in his campaign. Nadhim Zahawi said he would release his tax returns, but only those he had yet to complete. No one knew what was in Suella Braverman’s video since no one saw it.
Penny Mordaunt’s leadership bid. Photo: Tolga Akmen/EPA
Remember to reserve a space for your presentation event
Grant Shapps and Rehman Chishti didn’t even get to launch a campaign before their leadership bids evaporated, a loss for satire if nothing else. In 2019, even Matt Hancock and Mark Harper had something to do. At Door Matt’s, we were all given free phone chargers as a promotional product; appropriately enough, they didn’t work. Harper only had nine people in the room, four of whom were cartoonists. It was unclear whether Zahawi and Braverman actually had a pitch, as they were only given five-minute speaking slots at the launch by right-wing conservative lobbyist Conservative Way Forward. Or back, rather. A woman passed out during Zahawi’s slot. The chancellor for the next few weeks pretended not to notice and kept talking. Awks.
If you book a room, make sure it has air conditioning
Javid and Mordaunt booked a small airless private dining room in Westminster. Javid was sweating before he even started talking. Not the strongest selling point for the start of a campaign. Still, he handed out free ice cream at the end, so all was forgiven. Rish! I was in a room at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center that had plenty of free space, mainly because I had barred several members of the media, including myself. Tugendhat booked a four-storey atrium at Millbank and missed a golden opportunity to get in by abseiling. Did he mention he had been in the military? Truss was the only one to rent a room with fully functional air conditioning. Unfortunately, he had forgotten where the door was. He struggled to find his way and tried to climb out of the first floor window. His event had been unfortunate. But not so sad.
Tom Tugendhat… he was in the army, you know? Photo: Yui Mok/PA
Avoid all stunts
In 2016, during the leadership contest that Theresa May gave us as Prime Minister, Andrea Leadsom had organized an event where she was going to give a speech on the economy. He didn’t mention the economy once. Instead, in the end, he announced that he was going to Westminster. So a handful of MPs, including Tim Loughton and Theresa Villiers, walked the 300 meters to parliament shouting: “Who do we want? Andrea Leadsom. When do we want her? In September!” accompanied by me and a few other pirates who couldn’t believe our luck. Once we got to the parliament, everyone was a bit embarrassed before realizing they had no idea what they were doing there and scattered. Within days, Leadsom had dropped out of the race, to become May’s leader by default.
Learn to count
Under the Committee’s 1922 rules, all candidates had to obtain 20 nominations from Conservative MPs in order to take part in the first round of voting. Neither Shapps nor Javid could even pull it off and had to gracefully withdraw from the contest. It was unclear whether Chishti ever had more than one nomination: himself. “I would like to introduce the next leader of the Tory party. me.” Interestingly, Hunt made it to the first ballot, where he needed 30 votes to advance, only to get 18, less than he had the day before. It must have been something he said. Zahawi also went out in the first round proper.
Stupid trick…former leadership candidate Andrea Leadsom throwing her support behind current leadership candidate Penny Mordaunt. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images
Don’t mess with your opponents
It is considered bad form to sweep your leadership rivals. So, if you’re lucky, you have a small army of prominent Tory MPs and other supporters who will do it for you. For a long time, Truss was third in the contest, with her main rival for second place, Mordaunt, above her. At this point, Team Liz went looking for Mordaunt, while Truss pretended it had nothing to do with her. David Frost even had the cheek to claim that Mordaunt was a bit lazy and had never been up to it. This from a man who didn’t realize he had negotiated the Northern Ireland protocol that he was now trying to scrap because the EU had decided to implement it. Truss also received help from Kemi Badenoch’s team. Badenoch had never expected to do the latter two and, with the help of Michael Gove, his main man, was trying to raise his profile and secure a future cabinet job. So Badenoch undermining Mordaunt for being too awake won’t have done her any harm.
Close the debates
The final five candidates – Rish!, Truss, Mordaunt, Badenoch and Tugendhat – made it to the weekend of the first three televised debates. The first two were inconclusive affairs, with only Tugendhat brave enough to say that Johnson was completely dishonest. The others played it safe, with the main action blue on blue between Rish! and Truss. The two favorites quickly realized that they were hurting their chances and that the more the public saw of Badenoch, Mordaunt and Tugendhat, the more they liked them. So both refused to take part in the scheduled Sky debate. So it was cancelled. You can have too much democracy at times like these.
Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch taking part in Britain’s Next Prime Minister: The ITV Debate on July 17. Picture: Jonathan Hordle/ITV/PA
Manipulate the vote
Four of the final six candidates dropped out of the race in roughly the order people expected: Braverman first, then Tugendhat, Badenoch and Mordaunt. But that did not deter rival camps from hinting that they might lend votes to opponents to ensure key rivals were knocked out. Gavin Williamson, who prides himself on being an arch-manipulator and helped run Ready4Rish!, would like you to believe he was responsible for votes changing hands in this way, although given his overall levels effectiveness, it probably wasn’t. Still, voting Rish! and Truss down to the last two, Tory MPs have done everything they can to make their party lose the next election. At least that’s what several members of Team Penny suggested…