Penny Mordaunt has a winner sheen — but she will hit a ceiling of support

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And then there were eight. Eight Conservatives have collected the required 20 nominations to make it to the first ballot. To make it to the second they need at least 30 votes in the first ballot held today, with the results announced later today. Any candidate who fails to get 30 votes will be eliminated, as will whoever finishes last.

Who will survive to fight the second ballot? Jeremy Hunt’s race looks to be run. There are no candidates with similar politics who are doing worse in terms of public nominations and it is hard to see how he can find 30 votes. Otherwise, it is all to play for.

The biggest beneficiary of that could be Tom Tugendhat, the last man standing on the party’s left. But it’s the success of a woman running a very similar campaign to him, Penny Mordaunt, that is the theme of today’s newsletter.

Will the Penny drop?

The contest to be the right’s standard-bearer continues to be very crowded indeed. Although Priti Patel has dropped out, Liz Truss, Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Nadhim Zahawi remain in the contest.

All four are pledging to move away from the high-tax approach of the Johnson government. All four have consistently nodded towards the right’s preferred positions on equalities issues.

Penny Mordaunt remains in the contest and has also tilted to the right on tax, but she has held a more heterodox set of positions on equalities issues. For the moment she is in second place among MPs and has topped the most recent reader survey by ConservativeHome, the party’s popular grassroots website:

The ConHome survey is pretty meaningless. It isn’t a proper weighted sample of the membership, and I wouldn’t put any stock in what it tells you. Nonetheless, the survey really matters because it shapes the mood music around individual cabinet ministers and because it is treated as definitive at Westminster.

George Parker and Seb Payne have written an excellent profile of Mordaunt, which includes this assessment of her campaign from one rival:

“Penny’s lot have been crafty but very successful in going around everyone else and picking off one or two people. She is going to do very well out of this race.”

My underlying assumption is that at some point, Mordaunt will hit a ceiling and that she will run out of MPs who are willing to overlook their differences of opinion with her. Her ability to pull in support from the left of the party as well as the right won’t be enough to compensate for the fact that Truss is better attuned to Conservative MPs on social issues.

Part of Mordaunt’s success is that she is offering MPs a straightforwardly transactional pitch. She is the candidate who is best placed to unite the party (she’s a committed Brexiter but she is also a “One Nation Conservative”, etc etc), and win a general election.

Now, in different ways and for different parties, Boris Johnson, Tony Blair and David Cameron managed to attract the support of a very broad set of MPs essentially by saying “look, I’m a winner”. It’s possible that Mordaunt could do the same.

But one problem she has, in my view, is that almost all Conservative MPs are aware the party is in a perilous position at the moment. They don’t yet have the same level of desperation they had when they turned to Johnson in 2019, or the desperation of Labour in 1994. That absence of desperation will, I think, be a problem for Mordaunt sooner rather than later.

Could I be wrong? Yes! Candidly, I did not expect that when I wrote this Mordaunt would still be ahead of Truss or that Badenoch, Braverman and Zahawi would all still be on the ballot paper. Most of the undeclared MPs I talk to are more willing to overlook Truss’s pro-Remain past than they are to turn a blind eye to Mordaunt’s social liberalism. However, I can’t be sure that I am talking to a perfectly representative sample of the party’s right flank.

There is a very real possibility that Mordaunt is an acceptable candidate for enough of the right of the party that she will be left standing as Rishi Sunak’s major challenger by the end of the day. I don’t expect that she will, but it is certainly possible.

Choose your poison

We have another reputable poll of the Conservative party membership, this time courtesy of Opinium Research and Channel 4 news. But where YouGov showed Rishi Sunak losing to both Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt, this one shows him narrowly defeating both candidates. Here are the relevant charts:

Now, these two results aren’t all that different from one another. They show the leadership election is finely balanced. But more importantly, they suggest that even if Sunak does end up having enough support going spare to choose his opponent, he doesn’t have all that much to choose from. Both Truss and Mordaunt pose a serious threat to Sunak’s hopes of becoming Tory leader.

Now try this

Hello — Georgina Quach, Inside Politics editor, here. “A single moment’s delay could spell the difference between a year of bliss in heaven and eternal damnation in hell,” writes Tom Faber in his review of the video game Neon White. Tom’s talking about the game’s character, an assassin who must leap and somersault through each level at lightning speed to avoid demons.

But for many gamers, including myself, speed is actually the charm. One of the most satisfying parts of finishing each level comes at the end screen, watching the digits of the clock flicker as it measures the time you took (currently my partner and I are spending too many evenings wading through Cuphead on Nintendo Switch).

Tom’s article lifts the lid on speedrunning — a gaming subculture where you play games as fast as possible. It’s a fascinating look inside a close-knit community.

Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to insidepolitics@ft.com.

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