No, please no. Not again. Not again! As the Conservatives gear up to choose their final two candidates, and bookmakers place odds of 13/10 on James Cleverly, 6/4 on Robert Jenrick, and just 4-1 for Kemi Badenoch, one has the most awful feeling of déjà vu. The party have already had their Jeremy Corbyn moment in choosing Liz Truss and their ‘let’s just plump for a manager’ spasm in voting in Rishi Sunak. Neither of those things, as I predicted in 2022, brought them anything but electoral wipeout, and nor did their rebuffing of Kemi Badenoch, their only obvious star.
With their measly 121 seats, what choice do Tory MPs have?
Many of us (and I mean many) have simply been waiting it out for Sunak to lose the election and for Kemi – they’d surely learnt their lesson now – to take over as she should have done before. Yet the Tory party, if those odds are right, are about to self-harm once again. To choose one lousy leader is misfortune; to choose two is sheer carelessness; to choose three hints at a delusional brain-rot which should terrify us all. It seems the Tories have looked at Keir Starmer, decided that two terms of him would be better than one, and are preparing to hurl themselves off Beachy Head.
While Tom Tugendhat, though surely a shoo-in for shadow Foreign Secretary, seems out of the picture (odds 33-1), let’s look at how the other three candidates fared at party conference in Birmingham last week. James Cleverly, who made a decent enough Home Secretary, certainly has pleasant qualities: a slight twinkle in the eye, as though he can’t bear to take himself seriously for much longer than he has to, and a winning smile that would thaw out most on the doorstep. He is probably the nicest of........