Tory leadership

‘Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards — and good luck!’ Liam Byrne will forever be haunted by the note he left on his desk for his successor in 2010. Both coalition parties made much of what was supposed to be a joke about the difficulties of keeping Whitehall spending in check. David Cameron waved the note around in his victorious 2015 election campaign. Byrne later said he was so embarrassed by his mistake that he considered throwing himself off a cliff. There’s nothing funny about what Theresa May leaves on her desk for the next prime minister. Rather than just one pithy note, there’s a

With just a few days to go until nominations close in the Tory leadership contest, candidates are busy trying to shore up support in the parliamentary party. There are five – Sam Gyimah, Andrea Leadsom, Rory Stewart, Mark Harper and Esther McVey – who currently don’t have sufficient nominations to make it onto the ballot paper. Harper tried to get some attention by asking a question about the Peterborough by-election at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, while Gyimah has been doing the rounds in Portcullis House as MPs have trundled through. Meanwhile I understand that Rory Stewart has cancelled all his media appearances in order to hold as many meetings as

The Tory leadership contest rules are to change in order to whittle down the number of candidates, the party board confirmed this evening. After it became clear that the contest was going to be rather chaotic with more than a dozen candidates, the party agreed to raise the threshold for nominations to make it harder for contenders to get onto the ballot paper. Each would-be leader must have eight nominations to get onto the ballot, and then win the support of at least 17 MPs in the first round. Then at the second ballot, any candidate receiving 32 votes or fewer will be eliminated, with rounds continuing until only two

Why would you stand for the Tory leadership? If you’re someone like Dominic Raab, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt, you’ve been planning this for months, with a team in place since at least the start of the year because you really think you can win this. But there are other entrants who are highly unlikely to get anywhere near the final two but are still standing. Some of these MPs may think they genuinely have an outside chance, but others have made a variety of calculations. Rory Stewart, for instance, is building a proper profile for himself as someone unafraid to walk around in public asking people what they think

Jeremy Hunt’s approach is very odd. It is the first time I remember an aspirant for the top job saying: ‘Choose me: I’m frightened of a general election.’ He is obviously right that an election without Brexit accomplished would be very difficult for the Conservatives to win, but the way through that is not to narrow your possibilities in advance. If the newly chosen leader, with the mandate that being newly chosen brings, decided that no deal were his necessary negotiating backstop (which surely it is) or, more controversially, that he wanted it without negotiating at all, he would then be in a strong position to dare his parliamentary party

Will Boris Johnson being told to answer to allegations of misconduct in a public office derail his leadership campaign? The former foreign secretary has been told he must appear in court to answer the claims, brought in a private prosecution by campaigner Marcus Ball, who objects to his claim during the referendum that the UK sends £350 million a week to the EU. Today a district judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence to proceed with a trial. This prosecution will naturally be seen by someone of Johnson’s enemies as a chance to undermine him while he’s the frontrunner in the Conservative leadership contest. But this isn’t likely to have

Kit Malthouse’s entry into the Conservative leadership contest has created quite a problem for the other candidates, not so much because he appears to offer a serious threat to the more established campaigns, but because he is the architect of the ‘Malthouse Compromise’, which once promised to solve all of Theresa May’s Brexit problems. The trouble with the Malthouse Compromise is that its name includes a now highly-toxic C-word. Theresa May used ‘compromise’ so much in the weeks before she finally gave up and announced she was resigning that no leadership candidate worth their salt wants to drop it into conversation now. Even those who think that the best way

Dominic Raab –  I’m ‘willing to walk away’ The starting gun for the Conservative leadership race has been fired and there are currently eight declared hopefuls jockeying for position. Dominic Raab, the former Brexit Secretary, who resigned in protest last year over the government’s draft withdrawal agreement, sat down with Andrew Marr to outline his bid for the top job. Unsurprisingly, the issue of where the government now takes the Brexit negotiations featured highly on the agenda: Conservative Party leadership contender Dominic Raab tells #Marr he wants a #Brexit deal, with changes to the Northern Irish backstop, but otherwise he is “willing to walk away” with no dealhttps://t.co/nM4yerl2mP pic.twitter.com/W965YzPjXm —

The way to think about the Tory leadership contest is—I say in The Sun, this morning—that it is like a tournament with two sides of the draw, with each side sending one candidate into the final, membership round. One side of the draw is for full-on Brexiteers. Here Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab, Andrea Leadsom, Steve Baker and Esther McVey will duke it out. The other side of the draw features the Cabinet candidates: Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, Michael Gove, Matt Hancock and Rory Stewart. Whoever comes out of the full-on Brexit side of the draw will go into the final round as the strong favourite given Tory members’ views on

Theresa May has been forced from office by her own MPs because they concluded there would be no progress on delivering Brexit, or on anything important, while she remained their leader. But if they thought her government was characterised by factionalism and chaos, they ain’t seen nothing yet. Because the big facts of her failed government – no majority in parliament, religious divisions on how to leave the EU – cannot be wished away. The Buddha would struggle to pacify and unite her fractious party. And the Buddha is unusual in not running to be Tory leader. The coming weeks of battle for the Tory crown, which officially starts 10

Andrea Leadsom has become the latest Cabinet minister to suggest that they would like to succeed Theresa May as Prime Minister. After DfID Secretary Rory Stewart declared his own ambition for the top job, Leadsom used an appearance on Good Morning Britain this morning to reveal her interest. The Leader of the House of Commons says she is ‘seriously considering’ entering the race after her failed attempt the last time around: ‘I’ve supported her for the last three years to get Brexit over the line. She has said she’s going, so yes I am seriously considering standing.’ In the 2016 leadership contest, Leadsom made it into the final two but