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Former business secretary Kemi Badenoch has entered the race to succeed Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader, making her the sixth and likely final candidate before nominations close on Monday.
Badenoch, the bookmakers’ favourite, has pledged “an explicit focus on renewing our party for 2030 – the first full year we can return to government and the first year of a new decade”.
She has promised to control immigration and, in an article published in the Times, she said: “Our public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until we remember that government must do some things well, not everything badly.”
Meanwhile, Suella Braverman, a former interior minister and fierce opponent of immigration and “woke” causes, announced on Sunday that she would not run for the party leadership.
Her support among right-wing conservatives has evaporated. Braverman insisted she could have secured the 10 nominations from her fellow MPs needed to enter the race, but she told the Telegraph that “most MPs don’t agree with my diagnosis and prescription.”
On Saturday, Dame Priti Patel, the former home secretary, became the fifth candidate to publicly declare herself a candidate for the Conservative leadership, saying she could unite the party after the trauma of its July 4 election defeat.
The final list of contenders includes former foreign secretary James Cleverly, former security secretary Tom Tugendhat, former work and pensions secretary Mel Stride and former immigration secretary Robert Jenrick.
Patel said the party needed to move beyond “left and right” issues and focus on unity and providing a credible alternative to Labour on issues that matter to voters.
“We must now transform our conservative values into strong policies to bring positive change to the citizens of our country,” she said. “It is time to put unity before personal vengeance, country before party, and achievement before self-interest.”
A Brexit advocate and author of the previous government’s asylum policy in Rwanda, Patel was seen as a divisive figure when she was home secretary but now presents herself as a unifier capable of bringing together both wings of her party.
MPs will first have to whittle the expected field of six candidates down to four in September. The remaining four candidates will stand in a “beauty contest” at the Conservative conference in Birmingham in early October.
Conservative MPs will then narrow the list to two candidates. Party members, generally seen as being on the right of the parliamentary party, will choose the eventual winner on November 2.
Jenrick, once considered a moderate Tory, is now the bookmakers’ second favourite. He has reinvented himself as a radical anti-immigration candidate who has managed to win over many of Braverman’s former supporters.
Badenoch and Cleverly are Brexiteers hoping to win over Conservative MPs from the moderate wing of the One Nation party, while Stride, a Sunak ally, is said to offer a more managerial leadership style.
Tugendhat, who comes from the One Nation party’s anti-Brexit tradition, insisted he would consider leaving the European Convention on Human Rights if it prevented the UK from addressing immigration.
With just 121 Conservative MPs surviving from the July 4 general election, they are all likely to receive plenty of attention from the six candidates expected to stand in the coming weeks.
