The Tory Party's "Centrist" Turn?

This Tory leadership contest is weird. The long timetable has seen urgency pack its bags and go on a long summer's holiday, and so candidates are almost reticent about setting out their stalls. With the whittling down to the last four not due until September, presently very few MPs have declared who they're backing. The latest update has the candidates on four to 10 declarations apiece, with the utterly awful Robert Jenrick setting the pace. But by no means a convincing lead. The polls however are a different story.

Party member polling by Techne finds James Cleverly is out in front with 26%. Priti Patel is second on 20%, Kemi Badenoch 14%, Tom Tugendhat 11%, Jenrick on 10%, and Mel Stride brings up the rear on 6%. Also encouraging for the shadow home secretary is that members found him preferable in head-to-heads wih all the other candidates. This differs from the last (unscientific) polling round taken by Conservative Home. Its leading candidates - Jenrick and Badenoch - would be beaten by Cleverly 49-28 and 51-28 respectively in Tecnhe's findings. These results are more or less in line with work done by Ipsos at the beginning of the month. They found Cleverly and Patel were ahead among the public on who would make a good Conservative leader. Unfortunately, 20% of those asked thought Cleverly would make a bad leader (giving him a net -2) and a whopping 44% felt the same about Patel. Only Tugendhat had a net positive rating (17% vs 11%). Meanwhile, a separate YouGov survey for The Times found that Tugendhat is the least disliked among the public, with an approval rating of -12. This stacks up favourably against Stride (-15), Jenrick (-19), Cleverly (-22), Badenoch (-22), and Patel (-52). At least among the weirdos paying the Tories any mind these days.

These figures might give those MPs thinking that a lurch to the right is what the Tories need some pause. It suggests the recent comments/positioning of Badenoch and Jenrick in light of the riots hasn't gone down well. Similarly, Badenoch's Mail on Sunday article saw her double down on these themes and rail against "Blairite" identity politics. If the membership are, contrary to expectations, not in the mood for more boring far right cosplay, why might this be?

There could be three intertwined explanations for this scenario. For the shrinking Tory membership, culture war rubbish might be fun but the Tories just lost an election on that prospectus. The returning of five Reform MPs suggests that Nigel Farage and co can't be out-competed on these terms and a heavy investment here would see meagre returns, so why bother? Tory members might have done that rare thing of actually learning something. Second, regardless of how enthusiastic or otherwise they are about this rubbish they've seen how the racist riots appropriated this politics. If there's anything the typical Tory abhors above all else, it's disorder and the unpredictable consequences that might entail. We saw how far right mobs graduated from fighting the police and bricking mosques to the destruction of property and the looting of businesses, and carrying on peddling these lines could stir up future trouble. And third, there's the meagre possibility of a comeback.

In his interview on Times Radio, Michael Gove acknowledged that the Tories had had a "terrible result", but because they scraped back into the Commons with 122 seats it doesn't appear as catastrophic as the more excitable MRP surveys forecast some might be tempted to think that it wasn't that bad. You might say that there are Tory members who've convinced themselves an evisceration is no worse than a grazed knee. But adding to this in the thinness of Labour's victory. Likewise, while they were hammered relentlessly by the Liberal Democrats the yellow party saw their vote share fall. Therefore, for the average Tory who hasn't a scooby about the hole their party is in could conclude that a poor performance from Keir Starmer might see Labour's wafer thin plurality splinter (especially with the rise of the Greens and Left Independents) and the Tories come back after one term. To be sure, no one with a political brain thinks this but it's a plausible enough for some. Which means those from the briefcase wing of the party might do better than expected because they stand a better chance of credibly leading a revival of fortunes than those on the right.

Let's be clear, the membership are not taking a centrist turn. Tugendhat is as rabid about leaving the ECHR as any right winger, and Cleverly has proven himself a loyal going-alonger with all the disgusting schemes hatched by the last three Prime Ministers. But because they have the vibes that suggest they could do a better job turning outwards than the unknown Stride and the other horrors, they find themselves better positioned than might otherwise be the case. Still, the contest to be the leader who'll take their party into the next general election defeat has a long way to go yet.

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