What is the next Tory leader up against?

Voting in the Conservative Party leadership contest closes this evening, with Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick vying to become leader of the opposition.

Badenoch, the former business secretary, is the favourite to replace Rishi Sunak. Both her and former immigration minister Jenrick are on the right of the party – and neither are strangers to controversy.

After the surprise exit of former home secretary James Cleverly, the lack of an obvious centrist candidate means the race is "harder to pigeonhole", said Politico. While a right-wing candidate may appeal to party members, the same can't necessarily be said when it comes to an electorate that just handed Labour a historic landslide.

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

What did the commentators say?

Both candidates' messages seem designed to win back support from Nigel Farage's Reform UK, but with "significant differences" in their approach and policies, said The Independent.

Jenrick's warning that Farage risks "becoming unstoppable" if Reform does well in the local elections in May "should give Tories pause for thought", said Sherelle Jacobs in The Telegraph. He is betting on immigration as the "flashpoint issue on which the Tories must win back trust", framed in a way that will not "totally estrange" younger voters. In his words, the Conservatives must talk about migration in a way that "persuades rather than provokes". Canada's Conservatives, for example, call for immigration numbers to be linked to housing targets rather than "apocalyptically bellowing about migrant 'invasions'".

But Badenoch's "vow to heal a fractious Right" with a period of "renewal" is seductive. She believes the rise of Reform is a symptom of how conservativism has "morphed into much vaguer centrism". Her supporters believe the party's task, as it was after its 1997 defeat, is to "craft a single unifying idea that can repair the rifts between warring factions". Tony Blair, who led the Labour Party to that victory, agrees. "The most important thing for any political party is you've got to have clarity of direction," he told Politico's Power Play podcast.

But is Badenoch the one to repair those rifts? "The more people see of her, the more there is to dislike," said The Guardian's John Crace. However, she is undeniably "the real deal". "There's a purity to her nastiness. A seam of contempt that will almost certainly win her the contest."

Perhaps, but it won't necessarily win the next election, said the BBC. Many Tories are warning against "tacking to the right" and pursuing divisive issues like Jenrick's plan to leave the European Convention on Human Rights or Badenoch's "culture wars" around gender and race.

After all, Conservatives lost seats and voters to Labour and the Lib Dems, as well as Reform. A rightward swing could "permanently alienate more centrist former Conservative supporters", which the leader will need if they are to "restore their party's battered fortunes".

The "overwhelming majority" of voters don't care about internal party politics, said Connor Donnithorne, the Conservative candidate in Camborne & Redruth, who lost the seat to Labour. "You need to be in the common ground of British politics if you want to win." The Conservatives need to focus on issues such as "controlled immigration, lower taxes for working people, and supporting small businesses to create jobs".

"It's about having credibility, it's about being in touch with what people want and it's about delivering what you say you're going to deliver," he said.

What next?

The results of the leadership contest will be announced at 11am on Saturday, at a Conservative Party event in London.

Neither candidate has won support from a majority of MPs, so the winner will only have about a third of the parliamentary party backing them.

Whoever wins is by no means guaranteed to lead the party into the next election either, said Politico. Many Tories suspect the next leader "may not stay the course". A good result in next year's local elections will be crucial, but some are "already speculating that it could be Cleverly or even Boris Johnson" at the helm by then. There is still "plenty of time for yet another dramatic twist in the Tories' chequered fortunes".