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The Race to Number 10

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The Race to Number 10 THE RACE TO NUMBER 10 Nominations for the Conservative leadership contest have now votes after round two, the candidate with the lowest number of closed. This guide summarises details of the MPs who have put votes will be eliminated. themselves forward as candidates. This process of removing the last-placed candidate after each vote LEADERSHIP CONTEST will go on from 13 June till 20 June, until two candidates remain. Any candidate with formal endorsements of 8 MPs gets a place on There is then a postal ballot of the approximately 160,000 grassroots the ballot paper. Tory members taking place in July. This stage will be completed in the week commencing 22 July. The first of the “knock-out” ballots among the 313 Conservative MPs is held on 13 June. Any candidate receiving fewer than 5% The winner will lead the largest party in the Commons and of the vote will be removed after round one. the Queen will therefore be expected to appoint this person as Prime Minister, with no general election necessary. Under the Fixed Round two takes place on 18 June. Candidates with fewer than 10% of Term Parliaments Act,, the next general election is due in 2022, the vote will be removed from the contest after round two. unless the Government loses a Commons confidence vote or two- If all candidates meet these thresholds, then in each of the ensuing thirds of MPs vote for an early election. Tales abound of “Boris-haters” now planning to vote for him. One newspaper columnist who did a hatchet job on BoJo two years ago is finding MPs who congratulated him over the piece now declaring for Boris. Victory could become a self-fulfilling prophecy as votes flock to a perceived winner, unless Boris underperforms in hustings or TV debates. MPs have been impressed by the uncharacteristic discipline of his campaign, rolling out moderate next generation supporters and reportedly refused to meet with Donald Trump. After the hustings, critics admitted he had done his homework. “He was prepped, he was serious, he was charming,” said one attendee. This was before the Gove cocaine scandal broke: Boris will face new questions about why he attempted to snort cocaine once, even if his admission was coupled with saying he sneezed before ingesting. As for what happens if Boris does win: at least one of his long-standing advisors is already telling him to go for an early election, in case Jeremy Corbyn (now aged 70) decides to stand down. One pro-referendum Tory who spoke to Boris has the impression a referendum isn’t really ruled out either. This could be wide of the mark, but the possibility it’s correct is one of the things moderates ponder as they mull over whether to back the blonde bombshell. Before the race started, a lot of “smart” money was on Hunt. Early front-runners have not historically won Tory leadership races. Those who are good on TV do well (most notably the relatively unknown David Cameron vs David Davis). Hunt isn’t only good on TV – he’s won Westminster plaudits at every department he’s led. An entrepreneur, he knows how to run a department as if it’s a business. Yet, there have been some tricky campaign moments. At least one of those who attended the hustings left unimpressed by Hunt’s attempt to compare the Irish border issue with Switzerland’s. He said No-Deal Brexit is a “suicide” option and yet wants it kept on the table. Rival campaign teams have been merciless about this last piece of positioning. Overall, it looked like a slightly faltering start…and then came the Gove cocaine disclosure, coupled with Amber Rudd publicly backing Hunt and praising his hustings performance. Plus Hunt claims that Angela Merkel had hinted to him that the EU could reconsider at least some aspects of Brexit, if the right leader were in place. Judged both in terms of MPs declaring support and in terms of momentum, Gove appeared to be in second place before his confession of using cocaine during his early 30s. Now he must watch anxiously as rival candidates try to tempt away the 34 Commons colleagues who signed up with the Environment Secretary prior to the disclosure. The drama surrounding the cocaine confession is not yet over yet, because so many questions remain, with no shortage of people willing to pursue them. Did Gove lie on his US visa form? Can the US admit to its shores a senior politician who has confessed to Category A drug use? Will the Crown Prosecution Service come under pressure to consider action? And – more helpfully for Gove – what happens when his rivals are now asked in detail about their trickle of drug disclosures? Then there is Gove’s media support. His wife, Sarah Vine, is a senior Daily Mail columnist, yet it was the Mail on Sunday which broke the story. As for Gove’s fan and one-time employer, the fiercely anti-drugs Rupert Murdoch: he tends to signal his views through the pages of The Sun. It sent out mixed messages in its editorial column on 10 June and in the column facing it. The latter claimed criticisms of Gove for being a hypocrite were over-cooked, but ended by asking of the cocaine scandal: “Does it matter today? For Tory voters, yes.” At hustings, the former Brexit Secretary doubled-down on his declaration that he might prorogue Parliament in order to bypass it and force through a No-Deal Brexit. Democracy is not yet dead though. Raab met a wall of hostility during and after the meeting. MPs in rival camps now predict he may claim the votes of only the hardest of hardline Brexiteers. Says one: “Dominic was already fishing in the same pool of votes as Boris. Why wouldn’t you now go to Boris?” Few count him out though, and - given his limited Cabinet career - it is worth understanding why Raab is taken so seriously by his rivals. His “legend” began at the end of the Leave campaign. Full-time Leave staffers and their wider circles ended the campaign thinking less highly of stars like Boris and Gove but were united in their accolades of Raab. Raab’s position on bypassing parliament is novel – seek MPs votes by telling them you plan to ignore MPs is how one backbencher put it to us. Another suspects he has not considered the implication for the Queen: “Will she agree to prorogue if it is for the express purpose of silencing parliament and doing a No-Deal Brexit?” Some on team Javid seemed momentarily unnerved in the face of the early Boris surge. It is a testament to them and to Javid to watch how they responded, positioning the Home Secretary as the anti-Boris Leave candidate, with a full-on assault on the former Mayor’s “divisive” past attacks upon (to take one example) Muslim women who wear what Boris infamously termed “letter box” garb. Then he made sure to differentiate himself from rivals who indicated they were relaxed about Gove’s cocaine use and secured the backing of Moderates’ favourite Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Tories. Javid’s team praise the way he commands small private meetings and the word “decisive” has cropped up in insiders’ talk about the man ever since he first became a minister in 2012. A former investment banker, he’s credited with being sharp and analytical. His strategy is to tear pages from the Obama playbook, presenting himself unashamedly as the candidate whose very appearance reflects “Change” when set against traditional Tory stereotypes. In ordinary times, people would be paying attention. The real worry for Javid - a Remain campaigner in the referendum – is whether the Brexit v Remain schism tearing his party apart drowns out the truly distinctive elements of his pitch. He’s young, irrepressible and strikingly well-liked by Tory MPs we speak to across the Brexit-Remain divide. And yet the former George Osborne protégé is finding it hard to shake suggestions he’s really in the race to secure the Chancellor’s job from whoever does win. One can only speculate on what Boris’s Chief Whip, Gavin Williamson, said to Hancock in this regard when the two were spotted chatting in the Admiralty pub late last week. Not surprisingly, his team insist their man is in the race to win. Their plan is to get him placed at no. 5 or higher in the first round, have him hoover up all Remain MPs’ votes in round two and somehow get into the run-off. Hancock’s Brexit plan is to get the backstop time-limited, appoint a figure like US Senator George Mitchell (he helped broker the Good Friday Agreement) to look at the border question and at the same time negotiate a free trade agreement. It’s said to be based on high-level intel from friends the Hancock team has at the EU Commission and EU27 capitals… people who say the EU will budge on the backstop once a new leader is in place. Given the Conservative party’s strained relationship with business of late, it is refreshing to have an ex-CFO in the race. Harper oversaw the finances for one of Intel’s UK divisions before entering Parliament. If he can gain enough endorsements, he plans to run as the “clean pair of hands” candidate, as he never served in Cabinet under May. A Remain-backing former Chief Whip, his pitch is he’s the man to reforge the Brexit deal.
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