What is the process for choosing a new Tory leader?

Nominations for the Conservative Party leadership contest have closed, and the long summer of campaigning now begins for the six contenders. They are, in order of declaration: James Cleverly; Tom Tugendhat; Mel Stride; Robert Jenrick; Priti Patel; and Kemi Badenoch. Whoever wins will be faced with rebuilding a demoralised party that has gone down to its worst defeat since the dawn of modern democratic politics in 1832.
Dazed and confused, the party will have not only the hard work of renewing itself, but the additional, and until recently unfamiliar, sensation of being ignored by the general public. It’s a tough gig, being leader of the opposition, but someone has to do it…
Being in the immediate aftermath of catastrophic defeat and descent into irrelevance at least means that they can take their time in choosing the person to take them forward. Even so, it’s fairly self-indulgent. The six candidates will spend much of the summer going around the country, meeting and canvassing Tory members as well as MPs old and new.
The six will be whittled down to four after parliament gets back, with several rounds of voting scheduled between 4 and 11 September. The four will then take part in an informal “beauty contest” during the Conservative Party conference (29 September to 2 October). The MPs will then vote in October on which two of the four candidates will be presented to the wider membership to decide between in a final vote on 31 October. The new leader will take over from Rishi Sunak on 2 November.
The official answer is that there’s no great hurry, and a long campaign will allow the candidates to make themselves better known to the membership – only Badenoch and Tugendhat have run before. It may also be the case that elements within the Tory hierarchy were keen to ensure that Badenoch, the current favourite, wouldn’t be able to just walk into the role, and would at least be thoroughly tested over the next few months. The timing certainly hasn’t helped her chances, though she has some momentum behind her.
Being that the Tories are an argumentative bunch, they can’t even agree on that. Thus, while most want to start by analysing the divisions the party suffered, it is less clear which issues contributed to its past failure and which might be key to its future success. Patel, Cleverly and Tugendhat, for example, stress the need for “unity”, while Badenoch argues that “it’s not enough to call for ‘unity to win’. We need to ask ourselves, what are we uniting around? What are we winning for?”
It’s early days, but the indications are that migration, tax cuts, “culture wars”, and the question of whether to leave the European Convention on Human Rights will be some of the major areas for debate – just as they were in the period leading to the disastrous defeat on 4 July. More broadly, the discussion will also be about whether the party was “not Conservative enough” and “too liberal”; and in electoral terms, how on earth it will win back the voters it lost to Reform on the one side, and Labour and the Liberal Democrats on the other.
It’s going to get quite amorphous – and, if the past is anything to go by, nasty and personal, too. Worryingly for the Tories, at this stage, the candidates don’t seem to be reflecting the concerns of the electorate over public services and the cost of living.
Interestingly, the clearout at the last general election doesn’t seem to have altered the complexion of the party in the Commons – it remains fairly evenly balanced between the “One Nation” centre-right grouping and the various shades of Eurosceptic, socially conservative hard right. The control over new candidates exercised by Sunak’s team seems to have limited the march of the right, while the restoration of the whip to Michael Heseltine may be an early hint that some in the party want its civil wars to end.
As to the processes, in the case of the parliamentary party we’re talking about a highly sophisticated selectorate, in which leading candidates may “lend” their supporters to the challenger candidate most likely to knock out a more serious rival. There will be horse-trading and improbable alliances, and unlikely “dream tickets” based entirely on personal ambition and the desire for plum jobs in the shadow cabinet. Presumably, all six have the means to raise the £200,000 they’ll need to pay the party in order to go all the way to the final vote.
The conventional wisdom is that if one of the more right-wing candidates (Badenoch, Patel, Jenrick) makes it to the final two, then they’ll overtake the more centrist candidate (Cleverly, Tugendhat or Stride). This is what happened when Boris Johnson beat Jeremy Hunt in 2019, and when Liz Truss overtook the MPs’ choice, Sunak, in the first of the two elections in 2022.
The shock of the defeat in July might prompt a few among the grassroots to consider someone who’s an avowed unity candidate, such as Cleverly, but that would have the disadvantage of postponing tough choices on policy and tone. At the moment the contest is Badenoch’s to lose (and she quite easily could, simply by patronising people), and Stride is probably just trying to get the shadow chancellorship. Aside from those observations, it’s more open than it looks.