Pave the way to victory

Good morning. The good news, if you are Rishi Sunak, is that your position at the top of the Conservative Party is secure. All positioning for the next leadership election assumes that there is no chance that you will be removed from your position as leader this side of the general election. Apart from a few die-hard Boris Johnson loyalists, virtually everyone in the parliamentary party believes their interests are best served by keeping the Prime Minister where he is.

The bad news if you’re Rishi Sunak is that almost everyone thinks that even though you represent their best shot, following the local elections and the sobering reality they represented, a lot of of them think their ‘best shot’ isn’t good enough yet and the party is heading for defeat next year.

More thoughts on this in today’s note.

And they left

Lucy Fisher and Jasmine Cameron-Chileshe have a good read on the early stages of the Conservative leadership race 2024-5. The important thing to remember is that, essentially, there are three paths to victory in the conservative contest. You can win among the members, which requires you to finish in the top two among your fellow parliamentarians. There are basically two ways to do this: you can do it as a candidate of the party establishment or of its right. In practice, this means that it is easier to get elected if you are on the right of the party, because you can either win as the choice of the party’s power brokers or its supporters, while those of the left compete only in this establishment. slot.

There is another route, of course: the one taken by Michael Howard in 2003 and by Rishi Sunak in 2022, which is to emerge as the overwhelming preference of your parliamentary colleagues and therefore avoid all the mess of a contest. But none of the contenders for the next leadership race are aiming for that kind of victory, so we can get rid of them.

At the moment most of the chatter I hear from Tory MPs is about Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman, although not all of it is glowing. (I think an underrated candidate at the moment is James Cleverly: he seems to be doing a good job at the Foreign Office, he has few implacable enemies and still ranks high in the Cabinet rankings conservative.)

Much of Braverman’s speech yesterday focused on his position for the leadership race, as Lucy and Jasmine explain. But that comes at a cost to the government because it means more headlines on immigration, an issue where there is no prospect Sunak’s administration will be able to deliver on its most authoritarian promises.

The general hypothesis — as I have already written — is that Braverman wants to avoid seeing it destroyed by his failure to deliver on his hardline promises on immigration, just as Priti Patel’s hopes of running for the Conservative leadership in 2022 have been badly damaged by the same failure.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard a variation of the joke Braverman is looking for, as a Tory MP recently told me, “suicide by the prime minister.” Rightly or wrongly, most people in Westminster believe she’s looking for a way to get a statement out of Sunak’s government to avoid being there when the bill for her rhetoric comes due.

So while Braverman’s presence in the cabinet has a cost, I think it’s unlikely, unless something changes, that Sunak will decide that the cost of useless titles that he cannot say when he will meet his commitment on net migration is a price to pay to keep his right flank inside his cabinet, especially since he is not himself even liberal.

Now try this

Here’s a suggestion of food you can enjoy anywhere in Britain: Decatur, which staged a series of wonderful pop-ups before the pandemic, is now doing a great home boil meal kit. It’s very little effort for a wonderful meal.

Another advantage of visiting their website: you will hear about their pop-ups beforehand. (I refuse to share this information, sorry: it’s every man for himself when the food is this good.) I had a wonderful meal at their latest pop-up, in collaboration with Belgian beer company Duvel.

I have to be honest, I don’t know beer as much as I would like and therefore often stick to wine or cocktails, but I really enjoyed the various Duvel beers that came with our food. I’m off to knock on a few doors and test out the vibe next month so let me know what I should try from a night out to broaden my palette.

Top stories today

• Brexit surge | Rishi Sunak has been accused by a senior Eurosceptic Tory of throwing only ‘meaningless’ or outdated European-era laws on a long-standing promise “bonfire of the Brussels bureaucracy”.

• Respite from rent denied | Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer is set to reject London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s calls for powers to introduce a rent freeze in the UK capital, where payments for new rentals have jumped 17% in the past year, research shows.

• Biometric battle | Police Minister Chris Philp has pushed for facial recognition to be rolled out to police forces nationwide, which would ignore critics who say the technology is inaccurate and some of its applications are illegal .

• Lax tax regime |Three High Court judges invested in controversial tax evasion schemes which have been challenged by HM Revenue & Customs, including a judge who has ruled on tax avoidance cases, raising questions about the UK’s lax approach to disclosure of judicial interests.