The battle for Rishi Sunak's succession and the future political direction of the British Conservative Party is on. After suffering its worst electoral defeat to Labour, will the movement continue its radical drift or return more to the center, abandoning its obsession with migration and the populist overtones of the Brexiters? We will have to wait until early November to begin answering this question, when the future leader of the Tories, whose personality will be decisive, is chosen. On Wednesday, September 4, after a first round of eliminatory voting among the party's MPs, five candidates remained in the running to become Prime Minister Keir Starmer's number one opponent. Priti Patel – Boris Johnson's former interior minister, who was also a candidate – was curtly eliminated.

All are former ministers of Sunak: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat and Mel Stride. "For the moment, not one of them is well known to the general public," said Luke Tryl, director of the polling institute More in Common. On the other hand, the selection process should be more familiar to the British, who have seen five different Tory leaders come and go since 2016 (David Cameron, Theresa May, Johnson, Liz Truss and Sunak).

First, the 121 members of the Conservative parliamentary group in the House of Commons – the 121 survivors of the July 4 disaster – will have to decide between the candidates in successive votes, with only two remaining. Then it will be the turn of the 170,000 or so members of the Conservative Party to decide by postal vote.

'Despair' and 'anger'

Of the five candidates, Tugendhat, 51, former secretary of state for security, is the most moderate and the only one who dares to make a harsh diagnosis of successive Conservative governments since 2010. For this former member of the British Army who served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who launched his campaign on Tuesday, the party "owes an apology" to the British people, who deserved a "serious" government, whereas the latter, with "partygate" (the parties organized in Downing Street during the Covid-19 epidemic), "disrespected" them. Tugendhat even has said that he observed the conduct of the last Tory government – that of Sunak, of which he was a member – "with a mixture of despair and anger."

Badenoch, 44, also sent scathing jabs at the Conservative cabinets – of which she was also a member, with the trade portfolio, in 2023 and 2024 – but to criticize their positioning, not right-wing enough in her view. "They talked right but acted left," she said on Monday, promising, if she takes the helm of the party, to make it a movement "not afraid to be conservative." Combative and quick with a retort, the member of the radical pro-Brexit wing loves to fight on the terrain of "wokism," which she denounces, and is often the first to react on gender issues, to reaffirm her biological character.

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