What makes this Tory leadership race hard to predict

Good morning. The Grenfell Tower fire, seen one way, started at 12:54am on 14 June 2017 and lasted 60 hours. Seen another, it started in 1991 with a fire in an 11-storey building in Knowsley and is still going.

It was the result of a disastrous experiment in the idea that any institution can act as its own regulator. If you are a local council or a fire service, you need an external regulator with both the ability to meaningfully scrutinise your treatment of tenants and leaseholders, and the teeth necessary to drive real improvements. If you are a construction company or the manufacturer of insulation or cladding products, you need a regulator who will seriously test whether your products are safe. If you are a government minister or a department, you need a legislature that is willing to hold you to account.

As Martin Moore-Bick’s second and final phase of his report into the Grenfell Tower fire demonstrates, the fire, which killed 72 people in the largest loss of life in a residential fire in the UK since the Blitz, was the product of “decades of failure” by governments and the construction industry to tackle the risks of combustible panels and insulation. (Our excellent digest of the report can be read here, and the full report here.)

The reason why I say it is still going is that no one has yet faced criminal charges, the construction industry still lacks a regulator worth the name, and the 2022 scheme to protect leaseholders has a wholly arbitrary cut-off for people in blocks below 11 metres, which has absolutely no rational basis. It is rooted instead in one of the oldest and grubbiest cross-party traditions in the UK: the desire to protect the Treasury from excessive costs.

As someone who grew up in a tower block and lives in another, this is a topic on which I struggle to write without becoming incoherent with rage against everyone from Kensington Council to former housing secretary Eric Pickles. So I don’t have much to say beyond that I think the editorial board’s verdict in today’s paper is exactly right, that the BBC’s Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast is public service broadcasting at its finest, and that everyone should read Peter Apps’ terrific book Show Me The Bodies.

A topic I hopefully can write on more usefully is the first ballot of the Conservative leadership election, which also took place yesterday.

In Priti bad shape

Priti Patel has been eliminated from the Conservative leadership race on the first ballot. Here are the scores on the door:

Robert Jenrick 28 MPs (23.7 per cent)

Kemi Badenoch 22 MPs (18.6 per cent)

James Cleverly 21 MPs (17.8 per cent)

Tom Tugendhat 17 MPs (14.4 per cent)

Mel Stride 16 MPs (13.6 per cent)

Priti Patel 14 MPs (11.9 per cent)

Patel has therefore been knocked out. The second round of voting will take place on Tuesday, after which the final four candidates will pitch to members at the party’s annual conference in Birmingham at the end of this month.

Here, for context, are the results of the first ballot back in the summer of 2022:

Rishi Sunak 88 MPs (24.6 per cent)

Penny Mordaunt 67 MPs (18.7 per cent)

Liz Truss 50 MPs (14 per cent)

Kemi Badenoch 40 MPs (11.2 per cent)

Tom Tugendhat 37 MPs (10.3 per cent)

Suella Braverman 32 MPs (8.9 per cent)

Nadhim Zahawi 25 MPs (7 per cent)

Jeremy Hunt 18 MPs (5 per cent)

What these results have in common is that just as the third-placed candidate, Liz Truss, was the best-placed candidate last time, in my eyes, James Cleverly looks like the best-placed this time around.

As per usual in Conservative leadership elections, this is ultimately a contest with two routes to the all-important run-off round among members. There is the establishment lane (candidates: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride and the now-eliminated Priti Patel) and the rightwing lane (candidates: Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, and the now-eliminated Priti Patel). Some candidates have only one path to the run-off, but as Patel could tell you, having two is no guarantee of success.

If Cleverly can stay ahead of Tugendhat and Stride after Patel’s votes are reallocated, then I think he is in the box seat as far as that establishment slot is concerned: he will get the votes of most Stride supporters, and consolidate that part of the party. Although Tugendhat is identified with the party’s moderate wing, his various overtures to the right, including a willingness to leave the European Court of Human Rights, mean that he is going to struggle to pick up many more votes. (Don’t forget that Patel was against leaving the ECHR.)

Badenoch is a much more ecumenical candidate than Jenrick. Her supporters include MPs on the left of the party, such as Ben Spencer and Nigel Huddleston. Now, remember that having the backing of 31 MPs guarantees you a slot in the final four to get to conference and 41 (a third of the party, plus one) means that you cannot be shunted out of contention by tactical voting. Jenrick is very well-placed to get 31 MPs, but he is going to struggle to get to 41.

The biggest threat to him is Badenoch, and she has two major vulnerabilities. First, everyone knows she starts in a very strong position among the party membership, and if her rivals can keep her out of the top two, they will do so, just as Michael Portillo was kept out of the top two back in 2001. The second is that there aren’t all that many votes left on the right of the party. Between Cleverly, Stride, Tugendhat and herself, she faces a hotly contested market on the party’s left and Jenrick already enjoys a pretty healthy lead on the party’s right. There aren’t enough out-and-out rightwingers among Patel’s support for either Jenrick or Badenoch to be guaranteed to pick up much support there.

That much repeated line that Conservative MPs are “the most sophisticated electorate in the world” is a misquote: it was actually coined to refer to the Parliamentary Labour party, who between electing the shadow cabinet, the leader, members of Labour’s ruling national executive and much else besides were almost always voting in one election or another. But it is true to say that Conservative MPs are among the most complicated electorates in the world. To give you a sense of that, here are some of the (paraphrased) reasons that MPs have given me for voting for Patel:

“I won’t vote for any candidate who wants to leave the ECHR.”

“CCHQ is a mess.”

“I have known Priti since we were first elected in 2010.”

“I am on the right of the party, and Kemi Badenoch has been rude to me.”

“I am on the right of the party.”

These reasons, of course, could point to very different candidates. Badenoch, Cleverly and Stride have all ruled out leaving the ECHR. Stride has made fixing CCHQ a big part of his pitch and was first elected in 2010. Jenrick is the natural home for rightwingers who feel they have been slighted by Badenoch. And if you are on the right of the party, the most talented candidate available to you is Badenoch. (Robert Shrimsley makes an engaging case for why the Conservatives should pick Badenoch in his column this week. While this hasn’t quite shifted me from my “they should pick Cleverly” position, it is something I want to think about a bit more.)

Usually, the candidate who finishes second-to-last in the ballot — in this case Mel Stride — consistently loses ground on the next round of voting. But given that he is well-liked by MPs across the party, opposes leaving the ECHR and that, like Patel, he is a 2010er, I wouldn’t entirely rule out that he can defy precedent and beat Tugendhat into the final four, and with it a golden ticket to woo Tory members at party conference.

And given that Patel’s coalition of MPs is so broad, my sense from talking to MPs is that the batting order will remain the same on 10 September and that the candidates with the easiest paths to the membership vote are, in this order: James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, and Kemi Badenoch, with Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat bringing up the rear. But it is a very close contest which is still very much up for grabs.

Two days after the first Trump-Harris debate, we’re gathering the FT’s US politics experts for a subscriber-exclusive webinar to analyse the performances, policy positions and polling data — plus answer reader questions. Sign up here to attend on September 12, 17:00-18:00 BST.

Now try this

I have very much enjoyed your emails on my “four Ps” that I think Labour need to deliver on to be re-elected: patients, potholes, policing and purse (or something like that). Whether suggesting a less naff alternative to “purse” or putting forward your own Ps that I have missed, it has improved the acronym and sharpened my thinking. I’ll go over those suggestions in tomorrow’s newsletter.

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