What happened, James Cleverly?

Have you ever wondered what hats taste like? Ever looked at a nice trilby or a chic little beret and idly thought about licking it, maybe giving it a little nibble? I ask because I have recently gone into the business of eating them, and I could do with some outside opinions.

As you may remember I have, for quite a long time now, predicted that James Cleverly would eventually become leader of the opposition. He always struck me as an obvious choice, as he was close to Boris Johnson without being a fanatic, was a Brexiteer without turning to lunacy, and is generally able to talk like a normal human being.

I wasn’t surprised when he announced that he was running to be Tory leader over the summer, and I wasn’t surprised when he made it to the top four a few weeks ago. Hell, I risked choking on my own smugness when everyone went to the party’s conference recently and concluded that Cleverly had been the big winner of the gathering.

You can, as a result, imagine just how unbearable I was yesterday, when he became the candidate with the most votes from fellow Tory MPs. Had I had enough time to get one commissioned, I probably would have marched around Westminster wearing an “I told you so!” t-shirt.

It is lucky that I didn’t quite branch out into branded merch, as I was proved quite drastically wrong around 24 hours later. As you may have seen, two MPs will now court the membership and hope for their vote, and neither of them is James Cleverly. Instead, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have made it to the final two.

In my defence, it isn’t clear that anyone had expected this to happen. The result took everyone by surprise, and the entirety of Westminster is currently wondering what on earth just happened. The most popular theory seems to be that Cleverly was so popular in the previous round that just enough MPs who liked him decided to switch over to the candidate they felt was the least threatening.

Could they perhaps have coordinated themselves better? Arguably, yes! Another plausible explanation is that an increasingly cocky Cleverly campaign actively chose to lend votes to another campaign, but got the numbers wrong. If true, it would be hard to find a small enough violin.

In any case, what we do know now is that Jenrick or Badenoch will be leader of the opposition in only a few weeks. Crucially, because of the stupid system the party chose for itself, neither will be able to say that they have the confidence of the majority of the parliamentary party. At most, only a third voted for them.

It also seems pretty clear that the Tories have decided that, all things considered, opposition suits them just fine for the time being. Cleverly and Tugendhat were the two candidates who could, out of the final four, plausibly appeal to voters who’ve absconded to Labour and the Lib Dems.

Badenoch and Jenrick may be able to regain a few Reform voters, but politics, for the Conservative party, is currently a zero-sum game. Tack to the right, and you’ll lose everyone hovering around the centre. Do that, and you have no chance of getting back into power anytime soon.

This is why the real winner of today’s shock result is the Labour government. Someone like Cleverly could have fallen into a “fun uncle” routine, which maybe – maybe! – could have worked against Keir Starmer’s “dour stepdad” overall vibe. Perhaps most importantly, his pitch to the party had been a Kamala-esque call for the Tories to be more normal.

That the party saw the offer and chose not to take it is both funny and a sign that everyone in No10 can now relax for a little while. As written in this newspaper before, Badenoch is a politician who seems quite comically ill-suited to the demands of the job she’s hoping to get. Jenrick, on the other hand, might have got a haircut and gone on a diet, but nothing can detract from his complete and utter lack of charisma.

This year’s Tory party conference was a surprisingly jolly affair, and let’s hope they enjoyed it; it increasingly looks like it was a last hurrah before a long descent.