Who Will Replace Rishi Sunak To Lead The Tories? A Look At The Race Within

Even in the UK's most Conservative constituency, the former governing party's contest to choose a new leader is failing to set pulses racing.

Six former ministers have jostled for the past month to succeed ex-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the helm of the Tory Party. But with their battle confined largely to closed-door hustings among party faithful and op-eds in the national press, voters in Harrow East - where more than 53% of those who turned out at the general election on July 4 voted Conservative - showed little enthusiasm for the proceedings when approached by Bloomberg.

"I don't think the Tories will win again," said Patricia Tubbritt, a pensioner who was en route to the supermarket with a trolley bag in tow. After abandoning the Conservatives last month in favour of Reform UK, an insurgent party to its right, she professed herself uninspired by the six candidates and spoke of her nostalgia for former premier Boris Johnson, who was ousted in 2022 by his own party after a series of scandals, and no longer sits in Parliament. "He's the only chance of good leadership," she said.

The views in Harrow underscore the challenge facing whichever contender emerges victorious on Nov. 2. Their task is to rebuild Britain's self-styled natural party of government from the ruins of its worst-ever defeat and make it electable once more. And they have to achieve that when even voters in their most loyal constituency aren't certain they've got the right diagnosis of the country's ills.

"Why would voters care? The Tories were pummeled in the election," said Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester. "When you are the opposition, it is a daily struggle to get people to pay attention to you at all." 

The bookmakers' favourite is former Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch, who's been joined in the starting line-up by former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, ex-Home Office Minister Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel - a former Home Secretary, Mel Stride, who held the work and pensions brief under Sunak, and former Security Minister Tom Tugendhat.

But in Harrow East, the contest has failed to invigorate the sort of voters the Tories must win back nationwide to rebuild their fortunes. 

Dotted with retirement villages, Hindu temples, farms, and a generous helping of curry houses, the leafy district at the end of the London Underground's Jubilee Line was the only constituency in the country where more than 50% of votes cast last month went to the Tories. 

Of 25 people interviewed by Bloomberg in Harrow, including eight who voted Tory on July 4 and 10 who said they'd previously opted for the party, just one signalled any interest in the outcome of the leadership race, saying they favoured Tugendhat. The others either declined to pick a favourite candidate or saw little prospect in any winner reviving a party that led successive UK governments for the past 14 years and for more than 60 years over the past century. 

One - who like all eight Tory voters asked not to be named airing their political views - said they didn't think any of the candidates had what it takes. Another, who was tending to some greenery near Harrow East's Conservative Association, likened the Tories to a boat without oars. A woman who described herself as a lifelong Conservative said she didn't think the party would ever win the keys to 10 Downing Street again. 

Those sentiments reflect the scale of rebuilding required by the Tories, who won just 121 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons on July 4 - eclipsing previous nadirs of 156 in 1906 and 165 in the Tony Blair landslide in 1997.

The leadership contest is about to step up a gear, with launch speeches expected from Badenoch, Cleverly and Tugendhat this week after Patel delivered hers on Friday. Tory MPs will whittle the candidates down to four before the party's annual conference this month and then to two, who will go to a wider vote among grassroots members.

The winner must choose whether to pivot right to win back voters who defected to the populist anti-immigration Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage, or toe a more moderate line to appeal to the 46% of UK voters who opted for Liberal Democrat or Labour on July 4.

That tug of war could be summed up in the views of two Harrow voters: The Tugendhat supporter, who described the former security minister as the only viable option because of his centrist views, and Jenny Lawrence, a lifelong Conservative in her 50s who switched to Reform this year, calling Farage's outfit "the only alternative." The Tories, she said, have no future if they continue to fail to match their actions to their rhetoric. 

It's not just those who switched parties who the Tories must win back by the next election, but also those who didn't vote. Turnout was the lowest in almost a quarter of a century, at 59.8%, as voters who didn't think the Conservatives deserved another term, but were uninspired by Labour, switched off. 

James Baxter, a 76-year-old former airline worker, said he considers himself a Conservative, but this year, stayed at home on election day. "I was uninspired," he explained. "I don't think any of them know what they're talking about."

Harrow East was successfully defended by Bob Blackman -  a Tory who's represented the area since 2010. He took the highest vote share of any Conservative, and his 11,680 majority is the party's third safest, bettered only by Sunak in Richmond and Northallerton and former City Minister Andrew Griffith in Arundel and South Downs.

Blackman's campaign manager, Matthew Goodwin-Freeman, sees the opportunity for the next Tory leader in the nature of this July's election. That's because Keir Starmer's Labour Party took just 33.7% of the vote while sweeping to a huge win in terms of seats. 

"In five years' time when we have the general election, the whole 'I'm fed up with the Conservatives' will be over because they won't have been in power," Goodwin-Freeman said. "Don't think this is a decade of Labour by any stretch of the imagination."

Starmer's Labour showed what is possible in modern British politics by sweeping to a huge victory just five years after sinking to its worst defeat since the 1930s.

"If the Tories get back on the pitch, those big swings are possible," said the University of Manchester's Ford. "These are volatile political times."

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)