(Bloomberg) -- Conservative Members of Parliament knocked former Home Secretary James Cleverly out of the race to be the UK opposition’s next leader in a shock result that leaves two right wingers, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, to battle it out.
Badenoch, the former business secretary, won 42 votes in the fourth round of voting, edging out ex-Immigration Minister Jenrick on 41. Cleverly — who had topped Tuesday’s ballot and appeared a shoo-in to make the runoff — fell short at the last hurdle, with 37 votes, down two on just a day earlier.
The unexpected turnaround leaves a narrower ideological gap between the final two contenders, who both hail from the right wing of the party. That makes it more likely the Conservatives will tack right, after a disastrous general election result in July left members unsure of the direction in which to take the party. Cleverly had been seen as the last remaining moderate candidate.
Badenoch and Jenrick will now go head-to-head in a vote among the party’s wider membership, with the result to be announced on Nov. 2. The ultimate winner of the leadership race will succeed former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as leader of the Tories, and faces the unenviable task of uniting the party’s opposing factions after years of infighting.
The result of the vote among MPs was particularly unpredictable because the Tories were decimated at the election, leaving just 121 lawmakers to whittle the field down. But Cleverly had seemed the nailed-on favorite to make the final two after taking 39 votes on Tuesday, just 2 short of the tally that would guarantee a place in the runoff, with Badenoch and Jenrick scrapping it out to face him.
Jenrick and Badenoch supporters speculated that Cleverly had lent support to the former immigration minister in an attempt to ensure Badenoch didn’t make the runoff, but overdid it. She’s seen as the more popular candidate among the Tory grassroots, with recent polling by the influential ConservativeHome website finding she’d narrowly beat Cleverly in a runoff, but that he would beat Jenrick by a significantly wider margin.
The contest now appears to be Badenoch’s to lose — ConservativeHome found that she’d win 53% of the vote in a runoff with Jenrick, and he’d take 33% — with the remainder saying they didn’t know how they’d vote. If she does emerge victorious, she’ll be the first Black person to lead either of the UK’s two main political parties.
Badenoch, 44, has campaigned on a platform to end “woke” policies and to always say what she thinks. While that’s won her admirers, it’s also attracted criticism, particularly over remarks she made at the party’s annual conference Sept. 29-Oct. 2 that maternity pay was “excessive,” the minimum wage was “over-burdening” businesses and that up to 10% of civil servants should be in jail.
A former moderate, Jenrick, 42, has tacked steadily to the right in recent years, and his campaign has majored on an anti-immigration message and a promise to pull the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The elimination of Cleverly is likely to be welcomed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, because he was seen as a moderate more likely to attract centrist voters away from Labour. The Tories now appear to be on an ideological pathway geared toward winning back voters on the right who in July defected to Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, rather than those in the center who opted for Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
Whether that’s enough to repair the fortunes of a party which suffered its worst ever electoral defeat on July 4 remains to be seen. The Conservative collapse was the product of a chaotic five years during which the party 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.
(Updates with tactical voting in fifth paragraph.)
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