Should James Cleverly try to choose his opponent in final round?

Good morning. James Cleverly took a giant leap towards the final stage of the Conservative leadership contest yesterday. But who will join him, and should he try and game the outcome?

Pick your battles

James Cleverly won the third ballot of the Conservative leadership contest. The former home secretary secured 39 votes, pulling ahead of Robert Jenrick, who shed two votes between the second and third ballots, ending up with 31 votes, while Kemi Badenoch picked up two votes to reach 30. Tom Tugendhat, who got 20 votes, has been eliminated. Only two contestants will go through to a final vote by the party membership.

The vast majority of Tugendhat’s supporters will, if my contact book is remotely representative, swing behind Cleverly in the next round, while Jenrick and Badenoch are now in a close fight for the other members’ slot. Cleverly will have more than enough votes going spare tomorrow to choose his opponent. Which one should he pick?

On the one hand, according to both the ConservativeHome members survey and YouGov’s party members poll, Cleverly would beat Robert Jenrick but lose to Badenoch. One argument is that he should make sure he faces Jenrick because he is, on paper, much more likely to beat him.

I’m dubious about this one, though. In the past, both ConservativeHome and YouGov have overestimated the strength of the Tory right. I see no compelling reason to believe either survey has fixed that problem, and if Cleverly’s strength is being underestimated to anything like the degree that Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak were in 2019 and 2022, he will comfortably beat either Jenrick or Badenoch.

On the other hand, Jenrick’s campaign team has shown itself to be more aggressive, more effective and more willing to go into the gutter. Cleverly may well have more to fear from a month in which the former immigration minister’s slick campaign machine attacks him, than one in which Badenoch wonders out loud about which part of the British state she thinks is too flabby and too generous.

Cleverly’s leadership prospects will be better served if he defeats his more formidable rival, which, according to the polls is Badenoch.

I’m also dubious about this one, because it may be that YouGov and ConservativeHome have fixed their over-representation problem and that by picking Badenoch he is starting a fight he can’t win.

My general view: life is too short to play silly tactical games. Given the parliamentary party is not large, at 121 MPs, you can always end up in a situation where the campaign tries to lend votes to a preferred opponent, some individual MPs freelance and you end up finishing third in embarrassing circumstances. (In 1990, the organisers of John Major, Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd’s campaigns for the Tory leadership met up for dinner afterwards to compare the size of their various promises: they discovered that about a third of their colleagues had lied through their teeth.) When you only have 121 votes to play with, you’re better off just maximising your own authority, because if you win, you will need it.

Now try this

(Georgina) Yesterday Stephen and I saw the play The Other Place, which comes with the subtitle After Antigone. It grapples with death and the aftermath. In a taut 80 minutes, the reinvented tragedy excels at ramping up the tension as the characters move within a newly renovated, sorrow ridden house, but the pace partly leaves some of the more problematic family dynamics feeling a little forced and under-developed.

Runs to November 9 at the National Theatre.

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