The Leadership Audition

Tugendhat, Cleverly, Jenrick, Badenoch

The Conservative party is conducting an audition for the title of its next leader. Yesterday in Birmingham, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch had twenty minutes each on the stage to impress the party gathering and, if they chose to do so, to speak to the nation beyond. I have watched them all so that you don’t have to and there was a clear and definite winner. When I say that I make no judgment about the politics of the speaker. I am not saying merely that I liked one of the candidates more than the others. I am pointing out that three of the speeches were poor and one of them was excellent, as a speech.

Tom Tugendhat hit plenty of the right notes but somehow didn’t really play a tune. He stressed service and leadership and sought, rightly, to make the audience imagine him as a putative prime minister. He was pitching to voters who did not vote Conservative in 2024 which sounds obvious but which most leadership candidates fail to do. Tugendhat gave the speech with the most policy substance, on energy, health care and foreign policy. There was also a subtle critique of managing decline and lack of leadership which was directed back at his own party, even if it was disguised as an attack on the Labour party. On which point, his attack on Labour as “venal and vindictive” didn’t land, even in a Tory conference, because it was too silly. There were two problems. The first is that “conservative revolution” is not a good slogan; it’s a contradiction in terms. The second is less textual but more damning. Tugendhat just didn’t fly. He just didn’t convince somehow. The intangible sense of being the prime minister in waiting was conspicuously absent.

The same felt true of Robert Jenrick who decided to offer a litany of the prejudices of the right flank of the Conservative party. The villains of the speech were “the British establishment which puts Britain last” and the issues at stake were migration (“the world as his wife” as he put it, sounding like an outtake from The Comedians), foreign aid and the sapping of the national culture which, it was implied, must then follow. These were supposed to create what Jenrick called “a new Conservative party”. It was, though, a confused speech. For much of his address Jenrick seemed to be running against the record of the government he served in but then he turned to a long list of things that had got better. He said that “a failed consensus” is driving the country into the ground but this came just after his accusation that the Starmer government was a huge, and dangerous, departure from the last Conservative government.

Kemi Badenoch styled herself as the populist in the contest. Politicians are all rubbish, they don’t do what they say they will and the system is broken. The led to the bizarre accusation that Blair and Brown had not left government in 2010 but somehow carried on running the country as ghosts at the feast. She went on from there to make the classic mistake of pretending that the only thing the Conservative party now needs to do is to talk about its values at a greater volume. This followed the bizarre accusation that the last Tory government – of which she was a member – was too left wing. Engineers, as she said strangely, “do not hide from the truth”. Perhaps the most telling moment of Badenoch’s weak pitch was when she said that part of her was excited by the prospect of opposition. It seemed like rather a large part of her. A speech about students being told off for being Tories was not a pitch to be prime minister. It was a pitch to be leader of a pressure group.

The best speaker by a distance was James Cleverly. His speech was well structured and nicely written. “Passes for glasses” was a good insult and he was funny and warm. Standing behind the rostrum – the only candidate to do so – lent him the authority that the others lacked. The most telling contrast with the other candidates – Jenrick and Badenoch especially – by being optimistic. The choice of Ronald Reagan, rather than Margaret Thatcher, as his political hero gave him optimism as the main motif of the speech – “sell the benefits of Conservatism with a smile”. Cleverly ran on the record of the last government rather than ran away from it and he made a lot of his own experience. He is by far the most experienced Cabinet minister in the contest and he echoed Gordon Brown’s put down of David Miliband – “this is no time for a novice” – when he said this is not the time for an apprentice. Cleverly also contrasted with the other candidates by purveying a confident message – “no mergers, no deals” – about Reform.  

There are other reasons to choose a leader apart from who does a good speech at conference. It’s not definitive by any means. But there was clearly one candidate who, on that measure at least, was the best. Tugendhat said some good things but rarely persuaded in saying them. Jenrick and Badenoch told the party things it wanted to hear. Cleverly made the party feel the way it wanted to feel.