Marking out the paths to victory

Good morning. The good news, if you’re Rishi Sunak, is that your position atop the Conservative party is secure. All the positioning for the next leadership election takes as read that there is no prospect that you will be removed as leader this side of the general election. Outside of a few hardcore Boris Johnson loyalists, essentially everyone in the parliamentary party thinks that their interests are best served by keeping the prime minister where he is.

The bad news, if you’re Rishi Sunak, is that almost everyone thinks that although you represent their best shot, in the aftermath of the local elections and the sobering reality check they represented, many of them think that their “best shot” is still not good enough and that the party is heading to defeat next year.

More thoughts on that in today’s note.

And they’re off

Lucy Fisher and Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe have a good read on the first stages of the 2024-5 Conservative leadership race. The important thing to remember is that, essentially, there are three paths to victory in the Tory contest. You can win among members, which requires you to finish in the top two among your parliamentary colleagues. There are essentially two ways to achieve that: you can do it as the candidate of the party’s establishment or of its rightwing. In practice that means that it is easier to get elected if you are on the right of the party, because you can either prevail as the choice of the party’s power brokers or of its backwoodsmen, while those on the left are competing solely in that establishment slot.

There is another route, of course: the one taken by Michael Howard in 2003 and by Rishi Sunak in 2022, which is to emerge as the overwhelming preference of your parliamentary colleagues and therefore avoid the whole messy business of a contest. But none of the contenders for the next leadership race are aiming for that kind of victory, so we can put it out of our minds.

At the moment, most of the chatter I hear from Conservative MPs is about Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman, though not all of it is complimentary. (I think an underpriced contender at the moment is James Cleverly: he’s seen to be doing a good job at the Foreign Office, he has few implacable enemies and consistently does well in the ConservativeHome Cabinet rankings.)

A big part of Braverman’s speech yesterday was about positioning herself for the leadership race, as Lucy and Jasmine explain. But it comes at a cost for the government because it means more headlines about immigration, an issue where there is no prospect that Sunak’s administration will be able to deliver on its most authoritarian promises.

The general assumption — as I’ve written before — is that Braverman wants to avoid seeing her standing destroyed by her failure to deliver on her hardline promises on immigration, just as Priti Patel’s hopes of running for the Conservative leadership in 2022 were badly damaged by the same failure.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard some variation on the joke that Braverman is seeking, as one Tory MP put it to me recently, “suicide by prime minister”. Rightly or wrongly, most in Westminster think she is looking for a way to have a statement exit from Sunak’s government in order to avoid being there when the bill for her rhetoric comes due.

So while Braverman’s presence in cabinet comes at a cost, I think it’s unlikely, unless something changes, that Sunak is going to decide that the cost of unhelpful headlines about how he can’t say when he will meet his commitment on net migration is a price worth paying to keep his right flank inside his cabinet, particularly given that he is no liberal himself.

Now try this

Here’s a food suggestion that you can enjoy anywhere in Great Britain: Decatur, who ran a series of wonderful pop-ups pre-pandemic, now do an excellent boil at home meal kit. It’s very little effort for a wonderful meal.

Another advantage to visiting their website: you’ll get to hear about their pop-ups ahead of time. (I refuse to share this information, sorry: it’s every man for himself when the food is this good.) I had a wonderful meal at their latest pop-up, in collaboration with the Belgian beer company Duvel.

I have to be honest, I don’t know as much about beer as I would like and as a result I often stick to wine or cocktails, but I really enjoyed the various Duvel beers that were paired with our food. I’m off to knock on some doors and test the mood next month so let me know what I ought to try of an evening to broaden my palette.

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