Fight for right to challenge Boris hots up

Going into the second round of voting in the Conservative leadership contest – on Tuesday  – Boris Johnson’s place on the final ballot is all but secured, and the remaining four are fighting it out in increasingly desperate terms.

To make it through the second round each contender needs 33 votes from their fellow MPs. If all make that threshold the candidate with the lowest number of votes will be kicked out of the race. One candidate will be kicked out each day (unless more than one fail to meet the threshold), until there are two left. As it stands, the membership – who make the final call – will be choosing the next Tory leader between Boris Johnson and another.

Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove look safe. They have already got the support of over 33 MPs – receiving 43 and 37 votes respectively last week. Nothing prevents their support actually dropping – as MPs might change their minds and switch camps to make sure they back the right horse into No 10. But it seems unlikely either of those two won’t make it past this round.

Then there’s Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab and Rory Stewart.

Raab has failed to maintain the momentum he kicked off his campaign with – the hard-Brexit vote hasn’t corralled behind him in the numbers he needed, and his proposal to prorogue parliament to force through Brexit has scared off any moderate support he might have picked up otherwise. While he might receive an uptick in support from the left over votes from fellow hard-Brexiteers Andrea Leadsom and Esther McVey, many of those votes will also go towards Johnson’s camp. Unfortunately for Raab he seems to have miscalculated early on, and scuppered his chances, however small they might have been.

Sajid Javid had a slow start to his campaign, but thanks to a robust leadership launch, some excellent campaign material and a decent performance in the Channel 4  leadership debate last night he might receive a bit of an uptick in support. But even if he picks up some votes left by Hancock and Harper this time round he’ll need to do a lot to definitely make it onto the final ballot.

Meanwhile, there’s Rory Stewart – the oddball outsider who’s made waves across social media with his unique campaign. He’s frequently lambasted Johnson, said he couldn’t serve in a government under his premiership, and called him out for his absence at the TV debate last night. But he has a long way to go to meet the threshold, and even if he manages it he may be kicked out anyway with the lowest number of votes – he’s currently sitting at the bottom of the pack. But, since Matt Hancock has dropped out many of his votes are expected to move over to Rory’s camp. It might see him through this round but Tories are rightly sceptical he can go much further.

This was the backdrop to the first leadership debate of the contest. Following his leadership launch last week Boris has formally gone back into hiding. While the other four tussled over Brexit, social care, and tax policy Boris Johnson was nowhere to be seen, kept out of the public eye by his handlers. Today the candidates were subjected to scrutiny from the lobby journalists – and, you guessed it, Boris was absent again.

A televised leadership debate was ostensibly taken out of the American presidential playbook – but in actuality, it was altogether far more urbane. The candidates were never at each other’s throats, and out of it emerged no clear winner. Boris’s absence was noted by his colleagues, but he has enough support now that he needn’t worry about vying for the spotlight like the others. Even if he does lose some support from his MPs for his absence – which is unlikely anyway – he will still sail onto the final ballot. And, in polling of Conservative party members, he remains comfortably in the lead.

The calculation of his team will be this: Whatever detriment his absence last night causes to his campaign will be negligible compared to the potential for an actual screw up with his presence. If he’s going to make it to the final ballot anyway, why risk a public-performance disaster when you can just avoid it in the first place?

The other candidates don’t have such a luxury. Hunt in second place behind Boris has less than half of his support. They need to fight for the spotlight that Johnson naturally commands in order to be within a shot of that final ballot.

Throughout the week, as moderate candidates drop out of the race all focus should be on where their votes go. MPs who want to stop Boris should be thinking about backing the contender most likely to present a meaningful challenge to Boris with the membership.

Boris has said he’ll attend the BBC debate on Tuesday, held after the next candidate is kicked out.

His team remain quietly confident – so long as he gets onto the final ballot it is hard to see how any of the other candidates can stop him. But the BBC debate will be the first chance for his rivals to stick it to him directly. It could get nasty.