James Cleverly With the centrist Tugendhat’s supporters more likely to rally behind Cleverly than to back his two rivals on the right of the party, the scene appears set for a scrap between Badenoch and Jenrick to avoid elimination in the next vote on Wednesday. After that, the two remaining contenders will battle it out to win the favor of the wider Conservative Party membership, with results of that final vote due to be announced on Nov. 2.
| Candidate | Votes Sept. 4 | Votes Sept. 10 | Votes Oct. 8 |
|---|---|---|---|
| James Cleverly | 21 | 21 | 39 |
| Robert Jenrick | 28 | 33 | 31 |
| Kemi Badenoch | 22 | 28 | 30 |
| Tom Tugendhat | 17 | 21 | 20 |
| Mel Stride | 16 | 16 | OUT |
| Priti Patel | 14 | OUT | OUT |
The winner will succeed former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as leader of the Tories and then face the unenviable task of uniting the opposing factions of a Tory party riven by years of infighting. The Conservatives collapsed to their worst ever electoral defeat on July 4 after a chaotic five years during which they cycled through four prime ministers, including Boris Johnson’s scandal-riven tenure and a 7-week period under Liz Truss, whose economic policies roiled the markets.
The party’s members are now torn between tacking to the right in the hope of winning back former supporters who opted for the anti-immigration Reform party in July, or seeking to appeal again to more centrist voters who defected to the Liberal Democrats and Labour. Those divisions became clear at the Conservatives’ annual conference earlier this month — Jenrick’s tough-on-migration sound bites won applause from delegates, but so did Cleverly’s appeal for the party to be “more normal.”