There was only one reasonable conclusion you could draw after two interminable hours of Tory leadership speeches. It was that James Cleverly was far and away the best candidate. He is the only halfway sensible choice. The question is: do the Tories have enough halfway sensible members left to choose him?
Each of the four aspiring leaders had their time on the conference stage to woo the party membership, one after another. It was immediately obvious that Cleverly was far superior. He stood behind a podium, looking vastly more professional, authoritative and confident than any of the other contenders, who all chose to walk around the stage.
He showed some level of contrition for the Conservatives’ performance, albeit in a shallow manner. He made an apology from the Tory parliamentary party to the membership – presumably for a feckless election announcement and a tepid campaign – but did not have the courage to inform the membership of what will ultimately be required: an apology from the party to the country.
And yet, nevertheless, he said the word “sorry”, which is a necessary but insufficient condition of an improvement in the party’s fortunes. It was far more than any of the other candidates, who all seemed to believe that they lost the election because they weren’t quite conservative enough. He warned the party that it needed to “be more normal”, sensing how strange and angry it had come to seem in government. He marked out his position on Reform clearly – “no mergers, no deals” – and won the biggest round of applause of the event for it.
If party members were rational when they selected leaders, they would imagine how their enemies would react to them. If Cleverly won, Labour would be worried. He is the candidate they do not want. So logically, that is the candidate you go for. He is presentationally intelligent, thoughtful and electable.
The other supposedly moderate candidate is Tom Tugendhat. If he ever had any chance in this race, it’s surely gone now. His speech was flat, uninspiring, frequently boring and unconvincing. It was a meat-and-potatoes conference speech: attacks on Labour, vague talk about policy, an upbeat ending. All solid six out of 10 stuff. But when you’re lagging at the back of a contest, you need a game What are changer, and he did not provide one.
The two remaining candidates – Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch – are both functionally useless. They are so far removed from the steps required to fix the party’s position that they might as well be living in a distant galaxy.
Despite their competitiveness, they have far more that unites than divides them. Both of them are catastrophically presentationally inept, although Jenrick is marginally worse. His deep frown gives the image of some kind of night-time creature, a cheap knock-off Dracula, without the make-up to make it truly convincing. He looks like he has never experienced human kindness.
Badenoch is halting, strange, and often nervous. This would be a problem for any politician but it is especially damning when it’s one who repeatedly insists on how tough they are.
The basic programme is the same for either of them. Tear up international human rights law, cancel the fight against climate change, cut down on immigration. Both made drive-by attacks on trans people – grubby little politicians, scrambling around in the dirt, trying to find ways to turn voters against one another.
Both claim they want to fundamentally change the party. In fact, they are both continuity candidates. They promise more of the same: an attack on institutions, a constant search for electoral dividing lines which can be exploited for the party’s benefit, the perpetual attempt to spread division, and endless culture war, particularly on climate change and immigration.
Badenoch is possibly the more extreme, although it’s marginal. There is a thin layer of conspiracy sludge in her rhetoric. At one point, she baselessly suggested conservative students were marked down by their lecturers as punishment for their political views. She’s not just right-wing. She’s deeply paranoid.
She also laid out her plan to “reboot” the British state, which seemed to involve attacking the ECHR, judicial review, the Treasury, the Bank of England, devolution and the Civil Service. In other words, it is a Liz Truss agenda – the portrayal of democratic liberal institutions as unacceptable obstacles to the “will of the people”. A British version of Donald Trump’s “deep state” fever dream.
That’s really their secret. It’s not just that they have failed to properly distinguish themselves from Truss. It’s that they share with her the paranoia which made her mini-Budget so disastrous, prompting the sacking of the Treasury permanent secretary, the freezing out of the Office of Budget Responsibility, an absence of meaningful scrutiny, and the catastrophe which followed.
They both exist in a perpetual state of crazed ideological mania, without any of the charisma or intuition which might make it palatable to the public.
Cleverly is at least tangentially connected to the idea of reality. He has considerable presentational qualities. And he has sufficient capacity for introspection to recognise how the party needs to change. He is the obvious candidate, to anyone with an ounce of sense. The question is: has the party gone so far off the rails that such things are irrelevant? Or does it retain enough sanity to make the choice that is obviously in its interest?
