TNow that the vote count is over and the dust has mostly settled, the Conservative Party has 121 MPs left. Who among them (about one-third of the total before the election) will compete for the position of leader to succeed Rishi Sunak, who will soon step down? The main candidates, ranging from centre to right, are roughly as follows:
Jeremy Hunt
The former finance minister, who won his Surrey seat by just 900 votes to the Liberal Democrats thanks to the loyalty of local voters and some hard-nosed campaigning, had previously said he would not run again after being defeated twice by Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss.
But would he be tempted to change his mind? Some in the party’s moderate wing probably would. Hunt has the experience, political astuteness and talent to be useful to a party that has just lost large swaths of England’s heartland, and he can still attract the support of moderate Conservative voters who lean toward the Liberal Democrats.
Tom Tugendhat
The former security secretary is another living MP who is likely to be a receptacle of Conservative centre-right hopes and has tried to fill that role in the 2022 leadership election to replace Johnson, coming in fifth place.
Mr Tugendhat is affable, confident and has a rare seemingly safe seat among Conservative MPs – he won his reshuffled Kent constituency by more than 10,000 votes. His chances of victory depend on whether the Remain parliamentary party uses its heavy defeat to move to the centre or further to the right.
Victoria Atkins
Many voters, and even some Conservative Party members, may be wondering “who?” Atkins has been an MP since 2015 but only spent just over six months in cabinet, being appointed health secretary in Sunak’s final cabinet reshuffle.
Still, she is seen within the party as a good communicator and her Lincolnshire seat is relatively safe, even if her majority has plummeted from around 29,000 in 2019 to around 5,500. Perhaps it is an outlier.
James Cleverley
The former Home Secretary was a regular presence for the Conservatives on television and in the press room during the election, and helped them retain their Essex seat by around 3,500 votes.
Mr Cleverley is well-known, affable and communicative – officially a centrist but not averse to a bit of cultural warfare – and his biggest flaw, aside from a tendency to say the occasional silly thing, is that he is the centre-stage of Mr Sunak’s now-sunken project.
Robert Jenrick
The former immigration minister would probably prefer to be lower on this centre-right list, having recently relaunched himself as a hardliner on immigration and the culture wars, but he used to be more of a pragmatist.
A little-known figure until now, she rose to ministerial rank under Johnson and was nicknamed “Generic Robert”, but her ideological shift has seen her seen by some in the party as a Grade B Suella Braverman. Nevertheless, she is thought to be keen to run and organise, which could surprise people.
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Priti Patel
Ms Patel has not been Home Secretary since the end of the Johnson administration, which was not without incident – she narrowly kept her job after an investigation found she had bullied civil servants – but since then she has continued to work as an MP as usual, making some new allies in the process.
There was speculation she might struggle in Essex, but she held on to victory by nearly 5,000 votes, making her perhaps a candidate worth watching.
Kemi Badenoch
Another almost certain candidate from the right, her majority in the reshuffled Essex constituency was cut from more than 28,000 votes to just 2,600.
Badenoch’s run will likely be characterised by her usual strong rhetoric around identity politics, which she abhors, and her apparent ability to turn the most innocuous exchanges into arguments. She has considerable support, but some Conservatives worry about her combative nature.
Suella Braverman
The two-time Home Secretary has been running a de facto leadership campaign since being sacked by Mr Sunak in November last year.
Braverman’s platform is firmly on the right and is likely to focus on reducing immigration and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. She has supporters, but some Conservative MPs worry about her judgement and penchant for controversy. If she makes it to the final list and a party vote is held, Braverman could be hard to beat.
Nigel Farage
He is decidedly not a Conservative and currently leads four reformist MPs in the House of Commons. Would the rest of the Conservative party welcome him as leader? Would Farage want the job? The answers to both are probably no. But something stranger is happening.
