And then there were eight…
Rishi Sunak has emerged as the clear frontrunner in the Tory leadership contest after a first cull of hopefuls whittled the field down to a final eight, writes Mattie Brignal.
Sunak joined Liz Truss, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat, Kemi Badenoch, Jeremy Hunt, Suella Braverman and Nadhim Zahawi in making the cut, after each secured the backing of 20 MPs.
The result sets the stage for a fierce contest of shifting allegiances in the coming days.
Two candidates will go before the country after a succession of votes. The hot favourite to nab one of the spots is undoubtedly Sunak, who was sitting pretty on 46 nominations shortly before voting closed at 6pm. His closest challenger is Penny Mordaunt on 30.
One of the big thrusts of Sunak’s pitch is that, unlike his rivals, he’s not offering pie in the sky. At his official campaign launch today, Sunak said he wanted to cut taxes, but only after inflation had been tamed and the economy was growing. Maggie Pagano takes a look at the candidates falling over themselves to prove they love tax cuts the most – and the few who aren’t.
While Sunak may be the frontrunner in the parliamentary party, he will face stiff competition from the Tory right.
But the hard-Brexit-low-tax wing of the party needs a single candidate to coalesce around. Priti Patel made the job a little easier by pulling out of the race earlier today so as not to split the right-wing vote.
The Home Secretary is likely to throw her weight behind Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary. It would be a coup for Truss, already backed by Nadine Dorries, James Cleverly and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who called Truss a “proper Eurosceptic who believes in low taxation.” It will prove a tempting combination for many in the party who see Sunak as economically somewhere to the left of Lenin.
Truss will be fighting for many of the same votes as Penny Mordaunt, the trade policy minister who tends to top polls of the Tory members that will decide between the final two.
Also in the running to take on the mantle is Kemi Badenoch, a darling of the more traditional Tory right. She set out her stall in her leadership launch today, promising to fight the good fight against wokery and calling the net-zero ambition “unilateral economic disarmament.”
The last eight will need at least 30 votes in the second round of voting tomorrow, and some won’t clear the bar. The question then will be where the votes of the rejects go.
This makes the bottom of the vote tally table just as interesting as the top.
While all the permutations make it difficult to predict a final two, one factor that might affect the calculation is polling of Tory party members by ConHome. Its latest poll simulated run-offs between the last two candidates, and found that while Sunak would win in a head-to-head with Javid or Tugendhat or Hunt, he would lose against Badenoch, Mordaunt, Truss, Zahawi or Braverman.
The ConHome polling is dismissed by those at the bottom of the table and trumpeted by those at the top. But it does provide a crude snapshot of grassroot feeling, however unscientific, which could feed into MPs’ calculations further down the line.
Let the horse-trading begin.