What does James Cleverly's shock defeat mean for the Conservatives?

There were gasps when James Cleverly was eliminated from the Conservative leadership race yesterday. The shadow home secretary had been the favourite to replace Rishi Sunak, topping the ballot of MPs on Tuesday. But a day later he received only 37 votes, behind Kemi Badenoch on 42 and Robert Jenrick on 41.

"Team Cleverly" has been left with "an entire farmyard's-worth of egg on its face", said Paul Goodman in The Telegraph. There are several theories about what happened as party members are now left to choose between two right-wing candidates.

What did the commentators say?

One "conspiracy theory", said The Times, is that, "buoyed by their candidate's strong performance on Tuesday", Cleverly's team "thought they had enough votes to 'lend' some supporters to Jenrick", thinking a two-man race against him might be easier to win.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

One former cabinet minister blamed former defence secretary Grant Shapps, who was "running the numbers" for the Cleverly campaign. "He'll have been a clever dick" but it "clearly backfired", they said. This is something the Cleverly camp has denied.

"Instead of a conspiracy-based effort to sway the contest, what seems more likely is a cock-up," said The Guardian. Although the "immediate suspicion was that something nefarious had been going on", a series of individual MPs were probably "trying to vote in ways they believed might help their candidate", with "unintended consequences". For example, one backer of Tom Tugendhat, who was knocked out of the contest on Tuesday, told reporters they were backing Badenoch in an effort to get Jenrick eliminated.

"This doesn’t need to be organised," another Conservative told The Times. "MPs are quite capable of being mercurial on their own."

All of this means that we have a ballot "that suits nobody, other than perhaps Keir Starmer", said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. Conservative members will choose "between two flavours of 'we lost because we weren't rightwing enough'", which is "usually something an opposition party tells itself right before it loses another election".

By eliminating Cleverly, MPs have "denied members the chance to vote for someone focused on winning back voters from the Liberal Democrats", said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. This will "delight Ed Davey".

What next?

We will probably "never know what happened – at least not until Cleverly publishes his memoirs", said Cunliffe. But "what we do know is that the next Tory leader will come from the right of the party". 

The two remaining candidates "actually represent quite different strands of the party". Jenrick's pitch was "more populist in nature" and Badenoch is "offering something different and altogether more modern".

In the longer term, yesterday's result "may make the job of uniting even harder" because "both members and MPs may feel that the right candidate didn't get a proper chance", said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator. "That feeling may grow if life in opposition does not prove the tonic that some in the party thought it would." 

Cleverly could find "that he benefits in the long-term from being the one that got away". He could still prevail in one of the "several" leadership elections that might be required "before the party has a chance of winning again".

And "whoever the Tory members select as leader" this time, there's "still a secret challenger ahead", said Goodman. "Never forget that lurking figure in the shadows, pondering how the eventual winner may also come to grief." Boris Johnson's "hopes of a comeback are evergreen".