The runners and riders in Tory leadership contest - but can anyone unite the party?

Friends of former security minister Tom Tugendhat expect him to enter the brewing Tory leadership race.

Allies say he could “bring the coalition of Conservative voters back together and appeal to all sides of
the party”.

But there are also strong expectations that former business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch will run, while attention has also focused on former home secretary James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick, who served as immigration minister.

A Tory insider joked that party members would want someone who had the “policies of Farage” and the image of former PM David Cameron, but there is pressure from different wings of the party to take time to identify the best person for the job.

Ex-chancellor George Osborne said that Rishi Sunak’s “last great service to the party would be to delay the contest’s outcome”.

There are also calls for rank and file Conservative members to continue to have a vote on who should be leader.

Senior Conservatives want a long leadership contest, with the two top candidates to replace Rishi Sunak taking part in a “beauty parade” at the annual conference in September.

The first task facing Tory MPs when they return to Westminster will be to choose a new leader of the 1922 Committee, to oversee the process.

This committee, which represents backbench MPs, can set the timetable and even change the rules entirely.

Under existing procedures, Tory MPs hold a series of votes to reduce the field of hopefuls until only two are left, with the candidate in last place eliminated after each round of voting. The final two are then put to the membership, with a ballot held. The candidate with the most votes wins.

Some veteran MPs want to repeat the experience of the 2005 contest, when the two contenders chosen by MPs were presented at the annual conference.

It led to David Cameron winning, after he impressed the membership with his speech in the hall.

A shorter contest is also possible, however. And there is even talk of cutting out the membership entirely, in order to avoid a repeat of the 2022 result when activists chose Liz Truss as leader even though Rishi Sunak had the support of more MPs.

Toppled Tories lambasted Rishi Sunak and his team last night, as the blame game began over the General Election bloodbath.

Furious ex-MPs accused the high command of a series of catastrophic decisions which cost them their jobs and the party 251 seats.

They tore into their leader’s “bonkers” choice to call an early election before flagship policies, such as the Rwanda scheme to deport illegal arrivals, were having an effect.

Just a handful of trusted aides and allies were aware of the timing – only “posh” hangers-on who were “out of touch”.

One former minister told the Sunday Express: “A lot of people around Rishi are very clever and very slick. But the demographic was so narrow.

“He didn’t have an Angela Rayner figure who could tell him when he was about to make a mistake.

“There was nobody beside him saying, ‘This is bats*** crazy. We can’t do this’.”

In another blue-on-blue attack, a senior Tory said: “It was the worst campaign I’ve ever had to endure. We were all caught off guard and everyone was ill-prepared.

“If we’d left it until the autumn, Nigel Farage would have been away in America helping Donald Trump in the US presidential elections. By going early, we gave him a chance to fire up the Reform UK engines – and look at what damage that did to us.”

As the bitter recriminations began, some shell-shocked former MPs lay the blame at the door of Sir Oliver Dowden, former deputy PM and Mr Sunak’s closest ally.

He was said to be “obsessed” with going early and found an ally in James Forsyth, who went to public school with Mr Sunak, was best man at his wedding and became his political secretary in December 2022.

One ex-MP said: “Oliver discovered that every month, fixed-term mortgage rates were ending for 130,000 or more homeowners.

“He was obsessed about it. He was always in a flap and said that if we left it to November to go to the polls, a further 850,000 people would have mortgages which had doubled in cost.”

There was palpable fury that Dowden was rewarded with a knighthood in Mr Sunak’s dissolution honours list.

A former minister said that calling the election “before the Rwanda plan had even had a chance to go just discredited us”.