Conservative leadership election

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Oh fun...

A reminder of the system: MPs have a series of votes, in each of which the bottom candidate is eliminated.  (Well, unless there's a tie for last place; in that case precedent suggests they do it again with no eliminations and hope that the candidates get different numbers of votes.)  Once there are only two names left, those names are meant to go to the members.  (Well, unless one of the two is Andrea Leadsom and pulls out, or something like that.)

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Sajid Javid - once seen as a bit of a hardliner (member of the Cornerstone Group) but decidedly on the middle in the Brexit issue, and hasn't really shone in his Home Secretary brief.

Javid is a fan of Ayn Rand.  Enough said.

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Matt Hancock has announced he is standing.  I tend to think of him as a rather bland figure.  He has long standing connections with George Osborne which is probably not an advantage.

Rory Stewart has apparently stated that he will not serve in a Johnson cabinet.

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Cleverly is out, so they're back down to 12.

Apparently there's talk of requiring candidates to have 8 MPs nominating them.  On current figures that'd reduce the field to Gove, Hancock, Hunt, Javid, J*hns*n and Raab, but a few others are close.

EDIT: Malthouse out too, so down to 11.

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More rule changes: any candidate needs 17 votes in the first round to avoid elimination, and 33 in the second round.  (Some sources say 5% and 10% respectively, which given that there are 313 Tory MPs would mean 16 and 32, but the statement of the rules I've seen says a candidate with 16 votes or fewer will be eliminated.)

The first ballot will be on Thursday 13 June.

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McVey says her nomination papers are in, so presumably has found the eight nominators.

Are the names of the nominators going to be made public?

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All are in, except Gyimah, who announced he was withdrawing just before nominations were announced.  So there are 10 candidates.

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Under the new rules, the top FOUR candidates go to a ballot of the general public?

No - that change was considered and rejected.

I don't think they were ever suggesting going to the general public, were they?  It's just the Tory membership.

The first ballot is on Thursday; the bottom candidate will be eliminated, together with any other candidates who get fewer than 17 votes.  The second ballot is then next Tuesday; again the bottom candidate will be eliminated, together with any other candidates who get fewer than 33 votes.  Then the remaining ballots to get it down to the two who go to the membership will be held over the following days.

On the current figures Stewart, Leadsom, McVey and Harper are heading for elimination on Thursday.  I have a hunch Stewart at least will hang on a bit longer, though.

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First ballot: Johnson way ahead, Harper, McVey and Leadsom out.

Johnson 114
Hunt 43
Gove 37
Raab 27
Javid 23
Hancock 20
Stewart 19
-----
Leadsom 11
Harper 10
McVey 9

It's worth pointing out that 114 is enough that even if all other Tory MPs split evenly between two candidates they couldn't keep him out of the top two.

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From UK General Discussion:

So, is anyone likely to overtake Hunt to join Johnson on the postal ballot?

I think the consensus is that the others will generally transfer to each other and not to him, so yes, but it seems to me like he should get good transfers from some, like Hancock.

Johnson feels almost certain to win at this point.

Johnson is going to win unless something big happens.

The Anyone But Boris tendency might try to think about who of the other six has the best chance of beating him in the final ballot, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that any of them do have much of a chance.

Hancock, Javid, Raab and Stewart all need more votes to stay in after the next ballot (when the threshold is 33).  Just thinking about the eliminated candidates, McVey and Leadsom's voters may well favour Raab, so I think he has the best chance, but some votes usually move around in these things.

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https://twitter.com/bbclaurak/status/1139258134105591808

Candidates who are going to formally withdraw must do so by lunchtime today.  It looks like Hancock may well do so.

Robert Peston also says there is some talk of either getting rid of the membership ballot (presumably by persuading the runner up to withdraw, as happened last time) or massively shortening it.
https://www.itv.com/news/2019-06-13/why-tory-members-ballot-on-boris-johnson-may-be-culled-or-truncated-writes-robert-peston/

So the PM Johnson nightmare may start sooner than expected.

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There was an interesting perspective by Rafael Behr in the Guardian that said that a lot of Remain Tories actually think Boris is fooling the Brexiteers and vice-versa :

It gets even harder for whoever else makes it to the final round because he (and it is now guaranteed to be a man) would be competing against two people called Boris Johnson. One served as mayor of London from 2008-2016. He has liberal, metropolitan instincts – broadly pro-immigration, old-fashioned in his use of idiom, but a moderniser at heart. That Johnson was once celebrated by his party as the “Heineken candidate” because, in homage to the old advertising slogan, he could refresh parts of the electorate that other Tories couldn’t reach. He won in the capital, a Labour heartland. Twice.

Then there is 2016-2019 Johnson, figurehead of the Vote Leave campaign, the ultimate Brexit-booster. He is a more aggressive, divisive figure – a partisan of nationalistic culture wars who has consorted with Steve Bannon, the notorious alt-right ideologue inside Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. This is the Johnson who compares Muslim women in burqas to “letterboxes” and who defended the jibe yesterday as a bit of unvarnished plain-speaking – the kind of thing the public prefers to “bureaucratic platitudes”. This is post-truth, Trumpesque Johnson who threatens to take the UK out of the EU with no deal and to renege on financial commitments already made to Brussels. He would build an invisible wall and make Ireland pay for it.

Both Johnsons are dispensing wild promises to Tory MPs behind closed doors. Moderates and former remainers have been led to understand that London Johnson is the real one; that he does truly understand the perils of no-deal Brexit, that his domestic policy agenda would not be some turbo-Thatcherite slash-and-burn charge to the right. On the contrary, a liberal social reformer would emerge to renew Conservatism for the benefit of people who feel economically left behind.

Not impossible to think that Boris simply reverts back to London Boris after this campaign. And Brexiteers would only have themselves to blame.

It is certainly widely believed that he has no real personal belief in Brexit and only signed up for it at the last minute because he thought it was best for his political career.

But could he really carry off going back to being a moderate?  A lot of people really dislike and distrust him now (and I would suggest that there are abundant reasons to distrust him, pretty much whatever your politics).

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Hancock has indeed withdrawn, but appears not to have endorsed anyone else.

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Second ballot (comparison with first in brackets)

Johnson 126 (+12)
Hunt 46 (+3)
Gove 41 (+4)
Stewart 37 (+18)
Javid 33 (+10)
Raab 30 (+3) and out

33 was the threshold so everyone else stays in for now.

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So who are Raab voters most likely to go to?

I'd assume they'd all go to Boris. Raab was standing as the most pro-Brexit/no-deal candidate and Boris is their natural next choice as the only one who will tie himself to leaving in October.

This is the obvious answer but some of them may not like Johnson, in which case I suppose they might go to Gove; I'd have thought they'd be unlikely to trust the others, who all voted Remain.

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https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1141391631549157376

Changes on the second ballot
Johnson +17
Hunt +8
Gove +10
Javid +5
Stewart -10

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Final ballot

Johnson 160 (+3)
Hunt 77 (+18)
Gove 75 (+14)

Johnson and Hunt through to the members' ballot

One spoiled ballot.

(The Guardian says Johnson 162, but that gives the wrong number of Tory MPs.)

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So he was kind of like the British John Kasich?

The analogies only go so far.
Every last Republican would be considered a frothing madman in the UK.

The Tories are right of center and closer to the Dem party than Labour. GOP is Brexit party, but that doesn't make for convenient comparisons.

How about the Republicans being like the DUP?

Well, they have certain tendencies which you find in the Republicans but not so much in other UK parties, mainly those associated with the Christian Right, but overall Northern Ireland politics is sufficiently weird that comparisons don't work that well.

IMO most British Conservatives would be Republicans if they'd launched a US political career, and most US Democrats would either be Labour or Lib Dem in the UK, and would adjust their positions on issues where the countries are particularly different politically (guns, healthcare, Christian Right stuff).  I'm sure there are exceptions but in general I think Democrats aren't motivated by the same sorts of things as Tories and vice versa, except of course where they're mainly motivated by whatever suits their own careers best.

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One spoiled ballot.

Bet it's Stewart, Clarke, or May.

I think May will have voted for Hunt.

Dominic Grieve and Phillip Lee are also candidates.  Perhaps also Guto Bebb, Justine Greening, Sam Gyimah, or maybe even Jo Johnson