Nineteen-ninety seven wasn’t the worst Conservative party conference, a Tory supporter reflected. That was in 1998, once they’d realised how bad opposition was going to be.
In 2024, at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham, everyone agreed the Tories were buoyant. “The thing we had hanging over us for several years—defeat—has happened,” Neil O’Brien, the MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, told me. “Labour has had a worse start than people expected, with cronyism and wardrobe stories. Members are more enthusiastic about the election itself. And this election is quite exciting.”
In his final speech as Conservative leader, Rishi Sunak urged the Tories to stop squabbling and unite. But that can’t happen quite yet: huge banners adorned the hall, one for each of the four remaining candidates in the leadership race and their slogans (Tom Tugendhat: Serve. Lead. Act. Robert Jenrick: Change. Win. Deliver.). There was merch for everyone—TugendHATS, TugendTATS (only temporary) and TugendTAN, James Cleverly mugs (“no leaks here”) and Robert Jenrick baseball caps that say “we want Bobby J”. (One of Jenrick’s staffers regretfully told me he had just discovered that “Bobby J” is slang for something else.)
Most attendees were male, middle-aged and rosy-tinted. One complimented my coat. “Is it made of real skin?” he asked. They cheered at the leadership contenders’ promises to stop badgering them with emails requesting donations and to stop parachuting MP candidates into constituencies. Certain lines were repeated by several candidates. “Common ground, not centre ground.” “Treat the NHS as a service, not a religion.” Endless, endless jokes about Keir Starmer, Lord Alli and Taylor Swift.
Even here, amid the tweed, the braying and the champagne, Tom Tugendhat seemed too posh. He’s very upset about Labour’s “vindictive and nasty” private school VAT policy. He protested that in Afghanistan he served with people “from all walks of life”, before telling a story about his ex-colleague Prince Harry. Tugendhat likes to talk about the fact he can’t talk about his time with the military. He’s done a lot of work reforming our security services, but “I’m afraid I’m never going to tell you about it”, he winked. He launches into a story about Vladimir Putin. “We got this—I can’t tell you how…” It was all terribly mysterious.
Over at James Cleverly’s launch, music was blaring and people were clapping but, at the moment he was supposed to, the man himself failed to appear. “Keep it going, keep it going,” implored the announcer. The music trailed off. “Try it again!” The music restarted, and there he was. The crowd chanted: “James! James! James!” He signed some posters and raised a fist in the air. He was wearing a Taylor Swift-style friendship bracelet.
Cleverly was pitching himself as the most experienced candidate, and the least weird. He implored his colleagues to be “more normal”. He’s a good guy, he told us. “Imagine what I could have achieved if I was a bastard.” An interviewer told him that the public summarised the Tory party as: “Corrupt, liars, rich, useless, rubbish, bad, incompetent, untrustworthy and blue.” “Blue?” he said cheerily.
Robert Jenrick is currently the most likely to win. He’s the only candidate pushing hard to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)—“it is, in essence, leave or remain. I’m for leave.” He boasted about getting the number of people who arrived “illegally” deported up by 50 per cent as immigration minister. An interviewer asked what his daughter’s middle name is. “It’s Margaret Thatcher,” he said, before clarifying that he was joking—obviously that would be absurd. It’s just “Thatcher”. Jenrick respects strong women. “Everyone is female in my house. I’ve got three daughters, my wife and two dogs, which are both female.”
In the 2022 leadership election, Neil O’Brien backed Kemi Badenoch. This time, he’s supporting Jenrick. What changed? “I think [Badenoch] would be good,” he told me. “There are several good choices.”
“I’ve thought Robert for multiple reasons. That kind of 2019 conservatism, the combined sensible and level-headed approach, and the understanding of the need to reach out to people who don’t have a lot of money.” Simply tacking to the centre on everything isn’t the answer, O’Brien said. “Westminster still thinks there’s one group of people who care about immigration and one group of people who care about the NHS, and you’ve got to choose. It’s literally the same people, when you’re on the doorsteps.” Like Jenrick, he supports leaving the ECHR.
Badenoch was the early favourite, but she kept going off-script. She appeared to suggest maternity pay is too high (but then claimed she had been misinterpreted) and said 5 to 10 per cent of civil servants were so bad that they should be in prison (later saying the comments were a joke). On stage, GB News’s Christopher Hope asked her how it was going. “It’s going well,” she said. The audience laughed.
“A lot of people are not used to a politician who says it like it is,” Badenoch said. “People who don’t want me to win the leadership are telling you these things.” Margaret Thatcher was also misunderstood, she added.
Badenoch got the loudest cheers when she disparaged identity politics. “I am somebody who wants the colour of our skin to be no more interesting than the colour of our hair,” she said. “Many people on the left want the prestige and the joy of the civil rights movement. But a lot of those battles are already won.” Her team handed out a long essay about how the “bureaucratic class” promotes “endless new victimised identities”.
Badenoch said the saddest moment of her political career was resigning from Boris Johnson’s government. “It was a real shame,” she told me at her launch. “It could have been great. Covid wasn’t the right crisis for him… I was sending out all these emails apologising to my constituents.”
Not everyone could forgive Badenoch’s disloyalty towards Johnson. “Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat—all three of them put the party first before their own ambition and their self-interest,” Nadine Dorries said at a reception on Tuesday. “They weren’t plotters, they weren’t trying to remove a prime minister that the public had elected.” She won’t endorse any candidate other than Not Kemi. “I’m in this awful position where I just know who they shouldn’t vote for.”
The reception was hosted by More in Common, the thinktank founded to tackle political division. Dorries might have been unaware of this. “We have to turn our gunfire on the enemy,” she said. “We’re fighting the same enemy. We’re fighting socialism.”
Everyone was hoping Labour’s bad run would last five years. Cleverly and Jenrick had a good conference; Badenoch’s chances of making the final two seemed to be slipping away. People talked about David Cameron-style turnarounds after he won the leadership, and Johnson 2019-style voter coalitions. But both felt very far away for a party that hadn’t quite accepted how bad its defeat had been.
On the final day, two teenagers were playing a game of “Who Am I?” in the conference hall. One had a piece of paper marked “Rishi Sunak” taped to his forehead. “Did I get merch off this person?” His friend shook his head. “Have they been in controversy with the party recently?” “I would say so.” He looked lost. It could be anyone.
