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Kemi Badenoch, former business secretary, has entered the race to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader, making her the sixth and probably final contender before nominations close on Monday.
Badenoch, the bookmakers’ favourite, has promised “an explicit focus on renewing our party for 2030 — the first full year we can be back in government and the first year of a new decade”.
She promised to control immigration and, writing in The Times, she said: “Our public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until we remember that government should do some things well, not everything badly.”
Meanwhile Suella Braverman, former home secretary and a fiery opponent of immigration and “woke” causes, announced on Sunday that she would not contest the leadership.
Support for her among Tory rightwingers has been draining away. Braverman insisted she could have secured the 10 nominations from fellow MPs needed to enter the contest but she told the Telegraph that “most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription”.
On Saturday, Dame Priti Patel, former home secretary, became the fifth candidate to declare publicly for the Tory leadership, claiming she could unify the party after the trauma of its election defeat on July 4.
The final list of contenders includes James Cleverly, former foreign secretary, Tom Tugendhat, ex-security minister, Mel Stride, former work and pensions secretary, and Robert Jenrick, former immigration minister.
Patel said the party needed to move beyond questions of “left and right” and focus on unity and on offering a credible alternative to Labour on issues that voters cared about.
“We must now turn our conservative values into strong policies to bring about positive change for people across our country,” she said. “It is time to put unity before personal vendetta, country before party and delivery before self-interest.”
A Brexiter and author of the previous government’s Rwanda asylum policy, Patel was seen as a divisive figure during her time as home secretary, but is now presenting herself as a unifier who could bring together both wings of her party.
In the contest MPs will initially whittle down the six expected candidates to four in September. The remaining four will present themselves in a “beauty contest” at the Tory conference in Birmingham in early October.
Conservative MPs will then narrow the shortlist to two candidates. Party members, generally considered to be on the right of the parliamentary party, will choose the eventual winner on November 2.
Jenrick, once seen as a Tory moderate, is the bookmakers’ second favourite. He has reinvented himself as a hardline anti-immigration candidate, who has succeeded in winning over many of Braverman’s former supporters.
Badenoch and Cleverly are Brexiters who hope to win over Tory MPs from the moderate One Nation wing, while Stride, an ally of Sunak, would offer a more managerial style of leadership.
Tugendhat, who hails from the anti-Brexit, One Nation tradition, has insisted that he would consider leaving the European Convention on Human Rights if it stopped the UK dealing with the immigration issue.
With only 121 Tory MPs surviving the general election on July 4, they are all likely to receive a lot of attention from the six expected candidates in the coming weeks.
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