Hunt banks on anti-no deal line

As the Conservative leadership contest gets underway, the ever-expanding list of candidates to be Britain’s next Prime Minister are pegging out their positions on Brexit.

The favourite, Boris Johnson, is running as the Brexiteer’s Brexiteer. “We will leave the EU on 31st October, deal or no deal,” he said last week. In terms of this contest, it’s a savvy move. According to recent YouGov polling two-thirds of Conservative Party members want a no deal WTO-style Brexit. And it’s the members who get the final say on the next leader.

Shortly after Boris defined the parameters of the contest, former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab followed suit. He said he’d fight for a “fairer” Brexit deal, but would also leave with no deal on 31st October if no such deal could be struck.

Jeremy Hunt, Foreign Secretary and erstwhile Remainer, has taken the opposite line. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, he warned that pursuing a no deal Brexit would be “political suicide” for the Tories. By positioning himself as a moderate – who will seek to leave the EU with a deal, rather than risk the “extinction” a no deal Brexit will bring to the party – Hunt is carving out a different niche.

The calculation is this: Out of the 11 (so far declared) contenders, two will end up on the final ballot paper, decided by current Conservative MPs. The party membership will vote for the leader out of that pair. A hard Brexiteer will be one of the two – and the one currently expected to curry the most favour with the membership.

Those advocating the no deal line seek the support of pro-Brexit MPs, and then calculate that the members will demand a no dealer.

But the second spot will probably go to a candidate offering a different strategy. Enough MPs want an alternative, in the hope that members will then be persuaded to moderate their views once it narrows to two.

Unable to compete with Raab or Johnson’s Brexiteer appeal, Hunt has chosen the moderate route.

The question then facing these moderate Conservative MPs, or Remainer Conservative MPs, is what kind of non-hard-Brexiteer candidate do they rally behind? The likes of Michael Gove (a Brexiteer who does not like no deal), Jeremy Hunt, Rory Stewart, Matt Hancock and now Kit Malthouse are all making their leadership pitches with this wing of the party in mind. They each aim to appeal to those who will never go for a Boris or a Raab, but could stomach a soft negotiated Brexit. Who can prove themselves best able to deliver that?

Michael Gove’s latest policy pitch has been designed to show-off his soft-Brexit appeal. He pledged to allow EU nationals, who were in the UK at the time of the referendum, to apply for citizenship free of charge. The plan would remove the current requirement for EU citizens to provide “proof” of their right to stay in the UK – the “settled status” scheme. Since Gove has spent the past months warning of the implications of a no deal Brexit – as part of his loyalty to May in cabinet – he does not have the credentials to fight Boris or Raab on those terms.

In a similar vein, Rory Stewart, the International Development Secretary, said today: “I would like thousands of conversations up and down the country, co-ordinated on social media with all the results being brought together digitally. And then we come back into Parliament and we move very quickly to ban conversation about no deal, ban conversation about second referendum and focus on getting a deal done.”

The suspicion among other campaigns is that Stewart could be a front for the Gove campaign, attacking Boris and no deal before switching in behind Gove himself later. Gove’s team and Rory Stewart deny this.

Kit Malthouse, currently a housing minister and architect of the ill-fated Malthouse Compromise, is trying to find a line between the two – pitching himself as the unity candidate: “Those people who say no deal would be a catastrophe and those people who say it would be a walk in the park are both wrong – it is somewhere in the middle.” But as the contest stands now, to get anywhere, Malthouse will likely have to commit to one side of the no deal fence or the other.

Former Work and Pensions Secretary, and potentially the hardest of hard Brexiteers in the race, Esther McVey meanwhile responded to Hunt’s comments that no deal would be “political suicide” today. She warned that the real “political suicide” is not delivering Brexit. She advocates a “clean break” no deal exit. Andrea Leadsom, former leader of the Commons, joins McVey, Johnson and Raab in the hard-Brexit category. She’s said the UK must leave by the end of October on whatever terms.

As the contest goes on more candidates will eventually have to declare their no deal position. Are they after the support of the ERG and no dealers, a la Boris, Raab and McVey? Or do they go the other way and fight with Hunt, Gove and Stewart for the soft Brexit and Remainer wing of the parliamentary party?

Getting onto the ballot paper that goes to the membership is the first battle. When it comes to who the membership wants, those who took a moderate line will likely be in trouble. For now, two-thirds of the members seem to be after a no-dealer, and Boris is miles ahead of the pack in the polling. It is then hard to see how any advocate of a softer Brexit could trump Boris when it comes to the members’ vote.

The race has just started, though. The Tory membership will be particularly worried about the rise of the Brexit party and keen to find a candidate who can reverse the damage done already by its leader Nigel Farage. Dealing with the Brexit party is the priority, but in the final stages of the contest a hard Brexiteer might crumble under questioning, or fall apart in some other way. So the anti-no dealers fight on, in the hope something turns up and their chosen candidate can persuade the membership to choose a compromiser over the hard Brexit merchant. A long shot. But it’s a Tory leadership contest. Anything can happen.

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