Coming up is an important week in politics. Conservative MPs at Westminster will choose two candidates to be the country’s next Prime Minister, and after that those people out in the country who are members of the Conservative Party will make the final decision.
That’s not their fault, it’s our system. But it is why debates like the one on Friday night on Channel 4, and the one tonight on ITV, are important. They give us a flavour of, if not a say in, who we’re going to get. Ironically, over the next few days we are highly likely to gradually see some of those who performed the best on Friday being eliminated from the contest, and some of those who performed the poorest staying in.
The MPs have coalesced around Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss to the point where it is almost impossible for Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat to make it through to the final three, irrespective of how they perform.
The standouts on Friday night were Tugendhat (a snap poll by Opimium agreed) and Badenoch (the same poll did not, quite, concur). They were raw, human, articulate, and less scripted. Neither will be Prime Minister when the results are announced on September 5, but they will likely have ensured that they will be in the Cabinet.
Closer to the Boris Johnson regime were Mordaunt, Truss and Sunak. The latter was, by some distance, the most polished and assured on the central question on Friday night – the economic crisis. It is now inconceivable that he will not be in the final two.
The most interesting question is the battle for second spot between Mordaunt and Truss, both of whom performed poorly on Friday.
© PAThey are, in effect, both battling for the same group of MPs – those who could loosely be categorised as pro-Boris and pro-tax cuts. In order to make the final two, Truss and Mordaunt will need to separate themselves from each other.
Truss is losing, and her best hope of turning that round is probably to attack Mordaunt on her rather uncertain approach to gender self-identification. Look out for that this week.
Andy Maciver is Director of Message Matters and Zero Matters and former communication director at Scottish Tories
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