In the Tory leadership contest, successive rounds of voting have seen the original list of ten candidates reduced to just six. Sajid Javid and Rehman Chishti have pulled out of the race. Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zahawi, on the other hand, were eliminated late on Wednesday afternoon after failing to win enough votes from Conservative MPs to progress to the next round.
In order of their popularity among Tory MPs, the remaining candidates are Rishi Sunak (88 votes from colleagues in the latest round of voting), Penny Mordaunt (67), Liz Truss (50), Kemi Badenoch (40), Tom Tugendhat (37), and Suella Braverman (32). It will be very interesting to see which of the remaining candidates the supporters of Nadhim Zahawi and Jeremy Hunt—who respectively managed just 25 and 18 votes, falling below the required threshold of 30—will choose to back.
Zahawi had been attempting to steal some of Liz Truss’s thunder as the candidate of low taxation, so it is feasible that many of his backers will now line up to endorse the current Foreign Secretary—presently in third place behind Sunak and Mordaunt. However, the defeated Zahawi has since announced that he personally intends on staying neutral for the remainder of the contest.
Katy Balls, the Deputy Political Editor of The Spectator, has written perceptively about the possible options of those on the Right of the party:
The results showed Liz Truss on 50 nominations, Kemi Badenoch on 40 nominations and Suella Braverman on 32 nominations. Many of these votes come from the same pool in the party. Given the two candidates in the lead are Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, this flank of the party would be best served to pick a candidate to rally around if they want to be sure of having a candidate who represents their interests in the final two.
There may be machinations taking place behind the scenes this very minute to ensure that a single candidate can hoover up these (currently rather disparate) right-wing votes.
Despite being in the lead, the difficulty for Sunak is that the latest polling by the Times has indicated that, when the last two standing candidates are put to ordinary members of the Conservative Party in the final round, the former Chancellor would lose to every possible opponent other than Zahawi (now out), Hunt (also out), and Braverman (likely to be out soon). The same polling revealed that Mordaunt, trailing Sunak in second place at the moment, would beat every other rival candidate by at least 18 points in a run-off. For this reason, bookmakers are touting Mordaunt as the woman most likely to be our next prime minister.
Still, a lot can change. It is possible that the Tory grassroots will grow less eager about Mordaunt as they learn more about her history of ‘woke’ posturing. This track record is gradually coming to light. For now, however, it is probably hers to lose. Another round of voting will take place on Thursday, July 14th.
