Potential routes forward for the Tories post-election

Good morning. A good rule of thumb in politics is that the leadership election always starts earlier than you think. The first conversation I had about Liz Truss’s hopes of becoming Conservative leader happened in the summer of 2017, and it was obvious to me then that she was running an effective campaign.

(More embarrassingly, in November 2019, a now very senior member of Keir Starmer’s leadership team asked me what I thought his prospects for the Labour job were. “Not a chance,” I barked — or words to that effect. You win some, you lose some.)

One of the tricky balancing acts you have to pull off when running for your party’s leadership is that you do need to get ahead early on — David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Tim Farron, Theresa May, Vince Cable, Boris Johnson, Jo Swinson, Ed Davey, Keir Starmer, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak all started running before there was a vacancy — but you also need to look like you haven’t been misusing time you could have spent shoring up your predecessor.

While most successful bids for the top job start a long time before the contest proper, one of the most common failure modes is kicking off a little too early. David Miliband, Joanna Cherry, Sajid Javid and Andy Burnham all got a little bit too far ahead of themselves and ended up painting targets on their backs. Rishi Sunak’s slick leadership launch wasn’t his only problem when he was defeated by Liz Truss, but it didn’t help that his leadership bid had obviously been brewing long before he actually resigned from Boris Johnson’s cabinet.

Given that essentially everyone in the Conservative party believes that they are heading for opposition, the leadership contest is now under way in all but name. Lucy Fisher has written an excellent guide to the candidates making the early running. Some thoughts below on what the known unknowns in the contest are.

Live and learn?

If — as I think is overwhelmingly likely — the polls are about right and Keir Starmer leads the Labour party not just back into office but to a landslide majority, that will be a huge validation of the decisions he has taken since becoming leader and a reminder of how volatile and willing to shop around British voters have become.

One lesson the Conservatives should take from what is about to happen is that there is really no such thing as an irretrievable defeat. They could get back into office in a single term if their next leader makes the right choices and if Labour gets into difficulty: so their next leadership election matters a lot to us all.

But while that should be the lesson the Tory party takes, it is equally likely that what both Conservative MPs and party members conclude is that they are out for a decade so they might as well move further away from the British public. They may also decide to kid themselves that they can get back into office solely by winning over people who back Reform, as if the Labour and Liberal Democrat votes are irrelevant.

Equally, the next leadership election might be dominated by Conservative MPs who fear a rising Lib Dem tide or further Labour gains. In 2010, the Lib Dems entering coalition meant that many in Labour believed that what they needed most of all was a leader who could win over Lib Dem voters who disliked the coalition.

We don’t yet know what the precise shape of the general election result will be. We can have a pretty good idea that it will be an emphatic Labour victory, but the precise details of what happens will shape so much of how the Conservative party behaves and who emerges as the party’s next leader.

Now try this

I saw Sasquatch Sunset. There’s a good short film in there, but at more than 90 minutes, both the allegory for our stewardship of the planet and the scatological humour overstayed their welcome. Go see something else would be my advice.

Top stories today

• ‘Cincinnatus back from the plough’ | Boris Johnson has recorded endorsement videos for select Conservative candidates in a welcome intervention to Rishi Sunak’s floundering campaign.

• Back on track | UK inflation fell to 2 per cent in May, providing a boost to the prime minister ahead of tomorrow’s rate-setting meeting.

• Caution to the wind | Today, Labour will pledge to ease planning restrictions on onshore wind farms, despite the risk of frictions in local communities if people feel their concerns are not being heard.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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