Monday briefing: Why the race to lead the Conservatives is wide open

Good morning. As parliamentary recess comes to an end, the Conservative party is looking to six leadership candidates to set out how they would protect it from the same fate.

While the situation for the Tories isn’t quite terminal, there’s no doubt that the task is a massive one. If they take the wrong direction as they try to decide whether to tell voters they have been too right wing, too left wing, or too incompetent, victory at the next election will be a very distant prospect. But nobody agrees on exactly what the right direction might be.

And so, after a summer spent wooing the party membership (or, in Kemi Badenoch’s case, mostly on holiday), the contenders are now making their big Westminster push, ahead of the first vote to winnow the field among MPs on Wednesday. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to John Oxley, political commentator and author of the right-of-centre Substack Joxley Writes, about what to expect from a race that still looks wide open. Here are the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Israel-Gaza war | Tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets on Sunday night and a general strike was called amid public outrage over the government’s handling of the war in Gaza. The discovery of the bodies of six hostages in Gaza over the weekend prompted an estimated 100,000 to protest in Tel Aviv.

2. Education | Single-word Ofsted judgments for state schools will be scrapped with immediate effect , to be replaced by report cards aimed at improving standards. Criticism of the system intensified after the suicide of head teacher Ruth Perry when her school was downgraded from outstanding to inadequate.

3. Germany | A far-right party became the biggest force in a German state parliament for the first time since the second world war, exit polls showed on Sunday . Success for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party came alongside a surge for a new populist force on the left, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW).

4. UK news | Two teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of murder after a 13-year-old boy was stabbed to death in the West Midlands. The boy, who has not been named, died inside a house in Oldbury on Thursday afternoon.

5. Music | Artists have been urged to take a stand against “extortionate” dynamic pricing for concerts after Oasis tickets were hiked up to more than double their original price. Fans expressed their shock after queueing online for hours only to find that the price of the £135 standing tickets had risen to £355.

In depth: ‘It’s been a meet-30-people-in-someone’s-back-garden kind of contest’

Conservative MPs could be forgiven for taking things a bit slowly this summer. “They’re absolutely knackered,” said John Oxley. “Even in the safest seats they were fighting for their lives. Some of them, certainly, are only going to be thinking about the race closely now.”

Despite that sleepiness, the race is certainly under way: throughout August, the candidates have been making their case to members. Tom Tugendhat has visited more than 100 associations, while Robert Jenrick (who launched his campaign yesterday) got to 16 in the last week, Jessica Elgot, Pippa Crerar and Peter Walker report in this piece . Badenoch, on the other hand, has faced a certain amount of criticism for missing several events in favour of a summer break. (You can see profiles of all six candidates here .)

“They’re laying the groundwork,” Oxley said. “It’s been a meet-30-people-in-someone’s-back-garden kind of contest.”

With parliament returning, and the first vote among MPs this week, that will now crank up. Priti Patel and Mel Stride are thought to be most likely to be eliminated on Wednesday, but nothing is certain. “If there was a pecking order before the contest with Badenoch the favourite, it seems very hard to read now,” Oxley said. “It really is all to play for.”

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The campaign so far

The candidates might have been meeting the rank and file – but the shadow audience is Conservative MPs, who will narrow the field to two before it goes to the members. Much of the work in August has been undertaken with that in mind, Oxley said. “They are talking to the most engaged people in the membership,” he said. “Even if an MP has 600 or 700 members, there will be 15 they really hear from. A bit of buzz in that group might have some influence on their choice.”

While the hustings have been closed to the press, there hasn’t been much of the “blue-on-blue” hostility familiar from the Truss-Sunak race reported – perhaps because of a “yellow-card” system that punishes candidates for briefing against rivals.

“It’s been relatively good-tempered,” Oxley said. “They’re all trying to show that they are the candidate who can pull the party back together.”

Kemi Badenoch will hope to present herself as the frontrunner at her launch event later today. She will say that the Tories must resist having “the same policy arguments from the last parliament”.

She is not alone in arguing that her party must move on: Jenrick has said that the party must avoid “going down a rabbit hole of culture wars”, and James Cleverly warned this weekend that “we have had the tone that we’re the grumpy party”.

“He is rooting his pitch in being an affable person who wants to bring unity,” Oxley said. “The communications from Priti Patel to members are all about how the party is organised, and how the membership should be involved.”

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The race with the members

A JL Partners poll published yesterday had Jenrick just in the lead among members, with Tugendhat, Badenoch and Patel close behind. (It left Cleverly and Stride out, for some reason.) A recent YouGov poll had Kemi Badenoch leading among members, with 24%, and Tom Tugendhat in second on 16%. A Techne UK poll commissioned by James Cleverly had, er, James Cleverly first with 26%, and Priti Patel second with 20%.

Who knows, in other words. “The race is in flux and it will keep changing,” Oxley said. “And it is very hard to reach solid projections for the membership based on the samples that polls generally manage to get.”

One factor is that party members may not adhere to their factional disposition as rigidly as you might expect. “I heard about someone very staunchly right-wing saying how lovely Tom Tugendhat [a moderate] seemed to be.” Tugendhat is also the candidate who is most popular with the public, a Savanta poll found .

The race does not appear to be highlighting grand ideological differences, Oxley added. “It’s less about what they believe, and more about what they’re focusing on.”

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The message to MPs

The most useful thing for Cleverly in that ( slightly dubious, it should be noted ) poll is that it claims he would beat any other candidate in the final two. “That’s going to be really important,” Oxley said. “One big reason to woo the membership is so that MPs who might not have you as their first choice will see you as the person who can beat the candidate they really don’t want.”

Not many MPs have made public endorsements yet. They may be waiting to get back to Westminster, and get a better sense of which way the wind is blowing: a shadow ministerial job might be at stake, after all. Since the vote is a secret ballot, they are quite free to tell everyone they’re on their side.

Oxley notes that most of the new MPs became engaged in politics during the David Cameron era. Meanwhile, the classes of 2015, 2017, and 2019 have been significantly weakened. (For more on this change in dynamic, see this First Edition with Sam Freedman from last month.) “The shape of the parliamentary electorate has changed,” Oxley said. “One of the reasons Suella Braverman didn’t stand is that an awful lot of her constituency just disappeared.”

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The crunch point

While this week’s vote will start to clarify the picture, “the really important thing is going to be conference,” Oxley said. When the party meets in Birmingham at the end of September, the four remaining candidates will make speeches pitching themselves to MPs and members alike. “In the last contest fought this way, in 2005, that disrupted everything: Cameron exceeded all expectations, and from there he blew David Davis away.”

In the end, and even though the tone from most at the moment is about establishing themselves with a broad base, it remains likely that there will be a candidate representing the right of the party and a rival picked as the most plausible contender to beat them.

You might guess that that will mean Jenrick, who one supporter called “the nicer face of Suella [Braverman]”, against Badenoch – who is clearly on the right, but has picked up support from centrists – or the more moderate Tugendhat. On the other hand, there are also reports that an “anyone but Badenoch” effort is underway. So it it really is only a guess.

While the relative civility of the contest so far has avoided negative headlines, it comes with a caveat: “Before it started, there was an idea that this would be a postmortem and a big conversation about the future,” Oxley said. “But everyone running was involved, and they’re trying to win the support of people who were involved. So it’s hard to be brutally honest.”

With the race taking so long, “it’s created a really fallow period with very little organised opposition and very little deep reflection,” he added. It may also mean that the Conservative party emerges with a new face at the top – but no game-changing diagnosis of what, exactly, went so wrong.

What else we’ve been reading

• From TV star to homeless and penniless to now rebuilding her life, Gail Porter (above) is startlingly frank about the struggles she has faced in this brilliant Simon Hattenstone interview . Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters

• Why are JD Vance and other politicians on the right so obsessed with childless women ? It’s not just a phobia, argues Nesrine Malik : they like mothers because their “unrewarded, unsupported labour … props up and stabilises the economic and social status quo.” Archie

• ICYMI: Stuart Heritage has written about what happens when viewers (often acting in bad faith) lead a backlash against a TV show . Hannah

• Alexander Grothendieck was a revolutionary in postwar mathematics whose impact rivalled Einstein’s in physics a generation earlier – but in 1991, he disappeared. Phil Hoad’s profile for Saturday magazine is a remarkable study of a forgotten genius. Archie

• The NYT (£) has a nice (and beautifully illustrated) piece about how the representation of Asian men on screen is starting to move beyond tired stereotypes. Hannah

Sport

Paralympics | Hannah Cockroft (above) was among 12 British gold medal winners on Sunday, taking her fourth consecutive T34 100m title at the Stade de France. Golds in rowing, swimming and athletics were among those collected on the most successful single day for ParalympicsGB this century.

Premier league | Two goals for Luis Diaz and one for Mohamed Salah led Liverpool to a dominant 3-0 victory over Manchester United at Old Trafford, leaving Erik ten Hag under pressure again. Meanwhile, Newcastle beat Tottenham 2-1 and Chelsea and Crystal Palace drew 1-1.

Cricket | Another five-wicket haul for Gus Atkinson finished off Sri Lanka on the fourth day of the second Test and left England with an unassailable 2-0 series lead. The tourists were bowled out for 292 in pursuit of an unlikely 483 to win.

The front pages

The Guardian leads on “Protesters turn on Netanyahu in fury over deaths of six hostages”. The Times has “Germany’s far right has first big win since Nazis”. The Financial Times follows the same story with “Alternative for Germany wins its first state polls as voters quit centre ground”.

The Mirror reports on a “Race hate surge in schools”. The Mail leads on a survey from British bosses under the headline “Labour is ‘scaring off’ big business”. The Telegraph has “One-word Ofsted ratings scrapped”. The i also goes with that story, and “Schools to get ‘report cards’ as Ofsted’s one-word verdicts axed”.

Meanwhile, in the Daily Express it’s “How ludicrous! Labour axed winter fuel help to ‘stop run on pound’”, and the Sun covers a poll showing 60% of people worry that a ban on outdoor smoking risks forcing pubs to close: “We’re fuming”.

Today in Focus

Meet the new MPs: the surgeon, the lawyer and the 24-year-old student

The new parliament contains an astonishing 335 new MPs. Helen Pidd meets three of them as they get to grips with their jobs and leave their old lives behind

Cartoon of the day | Edith Pritchett

Sign up for Inside Saturday to see more of Edith Pritchett’s cartoons, the best Saturday magazine content and an exclusive look behind the scenes

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

When Craig Miller moved from California to the Catskill mountains in upstate New York in 2019, the freelance journalist wanted to enjoy a quieter pace of life. Yet, one year into his stay, at the age of 65, he became his town’s newest volunteer firefighter . “It was something I realised I had to do as rural fire departments are desperate for people to help out,” he says. “Answering the pager for callouts at all hours of the day isn’t an ideal retirement, but four years in, it has become one of the most rewarding parts of my life.”

Now 69, Miller has noticed a huge positive effect on his physical fitness thanks to his fire crew’s weekly drills. Despite initially thinking he would stop volunteering at 70, as that milestone approaches, Miller is now committed to carrying on. “I feel like I’m still learning and that’s really exciting to me,” he says. “One of the essential things in life is to feel you have a purpose, and this is mine.”

Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday

Bored at work?

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