Voters believe James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat are the Conservative leadership candidates most likely to make a good prime minister, although both are still trailing behind Keir Starmer, polling has shown as another crunch week in the campaign begins.
A series of party sources have predicted that Cleverly, the shadow home secretary, could pick up support among MPs in Tuesday’s second round of voting, when the five remaining candidates will be whittled down to four.
Priti Patel was knocked out after coming bottom in last week’s initial vote. It was a tight race, with Robert Jenrick topping the poll with 28 colleagues’ votes, followed by Kemi Badenoch with 22, Cleverly with 21, Tugendhat with 17 and Mel Stride with 16.
With Patel’s 14 votes expected to be dispersed among the remaining candidates, most camps believe that Stride is odds-on to be eliminated next. One source from another camp said:“In part it’s because the anti-Jenrick crowd haven’t decided yet who might be best placed to beat him, or are divided on who it should be.”
In a boost for Cleverly and Tugendhat, polling by Savanta showed that, among those running, voters think they compare best to Starmer as a possible prime minister, even if they are still well behind the PM’s own rating.
When all five remaining candidates were put in a head-to-head question versus Starmer as to who would be the better prime minister, Cleverly was 24 points behind Starmer, with Tugendhat lagging by 25 points, Jenrick by 28 points, Badenoch by 29, and Stride by 32.
Any minor boost for Cleverly and Tugendhat is mitigated by the slenderness of their lead over their rivals, as well as the significant pro-Starmer feeling among the electorate and the fact that about a third of voters said they did not have an opinion either way.
Jenrick’s attempts to cement himself as the frontrunner were helped on Sunday when Victoria Atkins, the shadow health secretary, announced her support for him. As well as being a prominent name among the Tories’ 121 remaining MPs, Atkins is seen as a Conservative centrist, while Jenrick has positioned himself on the party’s right.
Explaining her decision, Atkins said it was not “a matter of left or right” but who was best placed to help the party recover from July’s disastrous election result. She told Sky News: “I believe that Rob and I can find that common ground and reform the Conservative party to attract those voters back to us.”
Interviewed by the BBC, Tugendhat defended his potential support for the UK’s withdrawal from the European convention on human rights in order to enact more rigorous asylum policies. But he added that such a move was not an answer in itself.
“We need a Conservative revolution in four years’ time to return the country to the service of the people,” he said.
“We need to make sure the economy actually works for people, delivering a higher wage, lower migration economy – not just shouting at foreigners from the white cliffs and pretending that you can fix migration by withdrawing from a single treaty or changing a single bill.”
The four remaining candidates will make their case to MPs and party members at the Conservative conference in Birmingham in three weeks, after which MPs will select a final two, who will be put to a members’ vote.