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Conservative leadership: Tory MPs start voting for new leader - live news
Conservative leadership: Tory MPs start voting for new leader - live news
(about 2 hours later)
Michael Gove is out. Who did he vote for? “The best candidate,” he said.
Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader and a Boris Johnson supporter, played down the prospect of Johnson taking part in the two televised hustings planned within the next week when he was interviewed on the BBC a few minutes ago. Duncan Smith said:
Back in the committee corridor Michael Gove has just arrived, accompanied by John Hayes, one of his supporters. Was he feeling confident? Yes, he claimed.
My sense about the live television debates is I’m not sure that they have any effect at all on MPs. MPs probably watch less television than most others do, and they tend to want to do this internally.
Turning away from the Tory leadership contest for a moment, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has published an article this morning saying real income growth stalled last year, largely because of the impact of the Brexit vote on inflation. Here’s an extract.
Channel 4 News is planning a televised hustings for Sunday night, and the BBC has one planned for Tuesday.
Between 2011–12 and 2016–17, median incomes grew at a rate of 1.6% a year – faster than the 1.2% growth rate seen immediately before the recession (2002–03 to 2007–08).
Duncan Smith said he would expect Johnson to take part in TV events once the contest gets down to the final two, and party members are voting.
However, median household income growth stalled in 2017–18, making it only the fourth year (and second non-recession year) in the last 30 where median income did not grow. This stalling is in large part because real earnings fell, due to a rise in inflation following the depreciation of the pound after the UK voted to leave the European Union. Rising inflation meant that the freeze in working-age benefits hit poorer households harder than if inflation had not risen.
This is from BuzzFeed’s Alex Wickham.
All this means that median income in 2017–18 was only 5.6% higher than it was 10 years earlier, before the great recession.
Tory leadership candidates have been told they have to pay CCHQ £150,000 if they get to the final two, to pay for the hustings around the countryBig buy-in (but Jeremy Hunt could probably pay it with his loose change)
Jeremy Hunt has just marched in, looking quite purposefully (and not wearing morning dress - see 9.30am), with Dominic Raab, another leadership candidate immediately behind him.
And it’s true, according to a source from one of the Tory leadership campaigns.
Sajid Javid has voted.
This is from the Independent’s John Rentoul, who has been running a sweepstake on the results. It is obviously a classy sweepstake if Rentoul is differentiating between the mean and median Boris Johnson score.
Here is a Sky News tally of declared supporters for each candidate. Their numbers are very slightly different from ConservativeHome’s.
Sweepstake closed: 130 entries. Johnson mean guess 101, median 99; 46% put Gove in 3rd place; 45% put McVey 10th
As voting begins, Sky's final public tally - with 236 of 313 MPs declaredBoris Johnson83Michael Gove32Jeremy Hunt35Sajid Javid19Dominic Raab24Matt Hancock16Esther McVey6Rory Stewart8Mark Harper8Andrea Leadsom5
In the committee corridor Rory Stewart says he’s got dozens of MPs who tell him he’s their man, but they owe too much to other candidates who they’ve served for in the past.
MPs have to go in one door, and they exit another. Journalists aren’t allowed to film in this corridor and there is a policeman at the exit of committee room 14 (aka the Gladstone room). Most of the MPs voting are heading off quickly without hanging around to chat.
Is he trying to win them over in the corridor in the last minutes? “Yes - by looking deeply into their eyes, I hope so,” says Stewart.
Zac Goldsmith and Jo Johnson have arrived together.
Stewart says that he’s polling higher than Boris and is the man to unite the country. He says liberal Twitter loves him so much because he speaks from the heart, he appeals to young people, people in cities.
Some of the MPs were sent out to form a queue. We saw Leadsom re-emerge, but she is back in now, with Amber Rudd going in behind here. David Davis followed her in.
Asked if he’d back Sajid Javid, the other candidate pitching himself as the change candidate who can appeal to new demographics, he says: “I’ll have to think long and hard about who I’ll pick. He’s a nice man.”
The door has just been opened.
From my colleague Peter Walker
Steve Brine led a largish group of Tory MPs through the door. Esther McVey and Andrea Leadsom are the only candidates here and they’ve gone in. Steve Baker, the Tory Brexiter who at one stage was contemplating his own bid, is here too.
The Tory leadership ballot boxes have just been carried out of committee room 14. We’ll have a result in about an hour. Several of the candidates are still lurking outside.
I’ve left my office in the Commons press galley and I’m now on a bench in the committee corridor, outside committee room 14, where MPs will he voting.
Andrea Jenkyns has tweeted a picture of her toddler son.
There are about a dozen Conservative MPs on the benches outside one of the doors to committee room 14 waiting to be allowed in to vote. Steve Brine seems to be first in the queue, followed by Sir Desmond Swayne. Other MPs here include Charlie Elphicke, Peter Bone, David Tredinnick.
Clifford and Mummy just been to vote in #conservativeleadership. All dressed up in his shirt and tie! pic.twitter.com/ubHXDihc15
The ConservativeHome website regularly conducts surveys of Conservative party members as to who they want to see as their next leader. In the past they have turned out to be reasonably good indicators as to what ends up happening in internal Conservative party elections.
(Perhaps he should be standing. At least he’s got an excuse for believing in unicorns.)
It has published one today and it shows Boris Johnson apparently pulling ahead. More than half of members surveyed said they wanted him as leader.
It’s 12pm. Voting has closed.
But the real surprise is Rory Stewart who has come from almost nowhere and is now in second place.
The 1922 Committee is due to announce the results about 1pm.
Here is the chart.
Ken Clarke, the former chancellor and Tory pro-European, has just strolled down the committee corridor casually to find an eager Rory Stewart awaiting him. Stewart walked him down the corridor declaring to journalists: “This is the man who’s going to save my life.” Clarke is due to vote for Stewart, but the Stewart team were starting to worry that he might miss the 12pm deadline, when voting closes.
And here is an excerpt from the write-up by Paul Goodman, the ConservativeHome editor.
Downing Street is pushing back against Sajid Javid’s criticism of the fact he was not invited to Donald Trump’s state banquet (see 9.37am), saying he was among many ministers to have been disappointed. Theresa May’s spokesman told journalists this morning:
Boris Johnson’s most recent scores in our Next Tory Leader surveys have been 33 per cent, 43 per cent – and now 54 per cent. That 43 per cent score was already a record for the survey in this question, as far as we can tell, and Johnson’s eve-of-poll rating sees him taking more than half the vote.
This was a state banquet hosted by Her Majesty the Queen, so I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss in public who did or did not ask to attend. But as with any state banquet, only a limited number of places are available to the government. A large number of ministers who expressed a wish to attend were not able to do so.
Rory Stewart’s brilliant campaign has taken him to second, but he is more than 40 points behind the front-runner. Dominic Raab, who was on 15 per cent at the end of May, has seen his rating almost halve since then. Johnson has clearly eaten into his support.
No 10 are always wary about discussing royal-related matters on the record, but a Downing Street source said that the view of the White House or US embassy were “categorically not a factor” in deciding to not invite Javid, the home secretary.
Michael Gove’s turbulent week sees four points knocked off his total – not all that much, but he had a small rating to begin with: 12 per cent. That none the less saw him second in our last survey: he is now fourth. Jeremy Hunt rises slightly from five per cent to eight per cent, and Sajid Javid does likewise from three per cent to five per cent.
There is, the source said, a “fixed list” of people who must attend, including the PM, chancellor and foreign secretary, and there were in total eight slots available for ministers. The source also pointed out that the then-home secretary at the time of Barack Obama’s 2011 state visit – one T May – did not attend the banquet.
Sajid Javid, the home secretary, has said he was baffled and hurt by his exclusion from the state banquet for Donald Trump during last week’s state visit by the US president. As the Press Association reports, Javid told the Today programme he had still not received a proper explanation as to why was the only senior cabinet minister not to be invited to the dinner at Buckingham Palace. Asked why he was not there, he told the programme:
There were, however, no answers on how the decision-making process took place, and its undeniable that the optics are not great when the one Muslim-heritage member of the cabinet, who occupies one of the great offices of state, cannot attend a state banquet for Trump, whose anti-Muslim view and policies are much chronicled.
I don’t know. I have asked. I was just told that normally home secretaries aren’t invited. So I don’t know ...
In the committee corridor David Davis is refusing to make any bets on who will win, lose, or to speculate on whom Theresa May might be voting for. The two went for a drink last night, he says - but he insists he wasn’t campaigning for Dominic Raab when they met.
I don’t like it. It is odd. My office did ask No 10 and they said ‘no’. You’d have to ask someone from No 10 why they made that decision.
Previously Javid criticised Trump after he tweeted his support for the right-wing Britain First group. Javid said the president was endorsing the views of “a vile, hate-filled racist organisation that hates me and people like me”.
Asked on the Today programme if he thought his exclusion was due to his Muslim background, Javid said: “I am not saying that at all. I really don’t know.”
As the BBC’s Ross Hawkins points out, there is precedent for the home secretary being invited to a state banquet.
State banquet in 2017 - Home Secretary of day was invited. pic.twitter.com/8ToruuFmaA
This is rather bizarre from Jeremy Hunt.
Woke up this morning and felt a bit like the morning of my wedding. Something big is going to change but don't quite know how it will unfold #HastobeHunt
Presumably on the morning of his wedding Hunt was confident that he would be celebrating in the evening ....
And he was looking forward to spending the day with people he liked and trusted ...
And he did not have to worry about the prospect of his day being spoiled by Boris Johnson ...
Sir Oliver Letwin, the Conservative former cabinet minister who was backing the cross-party attempt yesterday block a no-deal Brexit, has said that parliament had now run out of options for preventing the UK crashing out of the EU, my colleague Matthew Weaver reports.
Parliament is out of options to stop no-deal Brexit – Oliver Letwin
There is nothing that excites Westminster more than a leadership election and today we have the first round of voting in the contest to replace Theresa May as Conservative leader and prime minister. The entire election will be a relatively long-drawn out process - we have got several more rounds of voting in Westminster, hustings, TV debates, and the membership ballot to look forward to - but today is going to clarify matters a bit. This is what we will find out.
1) Who’s out? There are currently 10 candidates in the race. At least one of them will definitely drop out today - the person with the fewest votes - but under new rules introduced by the Conservative 1922 Committee any candidate with fewer than 17 votes (5% of the parliamentary party) will also be out. Mark Harper, Rory Stewart, Esther McVey and Andrea Leadsom all look as though they will struggle to hit this target, and so by the end of the day the field could be down to six.
2) Is Boris Johnson as far ahead as everyone thinks? The ConservativeHome website has been keeping a tally of how many MP supporters each MP has and it has Johnson well ahead, on 83, followed by Jeremy Hunt (37), Michael Gove (34), Dominic Raab (23), Sajid Javid (19) and Matthew Hancock (17). But - astonishing as the idea might seem - it is the case that occasionally MPs do not tell the truth about how they will vote in a secret ballot. Yesterday the politics academic Philip Cowley summed it up like this on Twitter.
If I was a Conservative MP, I'm fairly certain by now I'd have pledged my support to Boris Johnson - because he'll probably win and I want a job - but I doubt I'd actually vote for him.I am a shit, yes, but then the parliamentary party contains a fair few of them.
Today we will find out if there are sizeable numbers of Tories doing a Cowley.
3) Who are Johnson’s main rivals? Hunt looks like the candidate most likely to join Johnson on the final ballot but, according to the ConservativeHome numbers, 75 Tory MPs have not declared for anyone and Hunt is only 20 declared votes ahead of Matthew Hancock. The results being announced at 1pm may well rank candidates in a different order to what people currently expect. Michael Gove and Dominic Raab have been struggling this week, and Sajid Javid seems to have had some last-minute momentum. By the end of today we should have a much better idea as to who might bag the number two slot.
4) Where will second preference votes start to go? At least one candidate, and perhaps up to four, will be forced out at lunchtime. It is possible that other candidates might pass the 17-vote threshold but decide to drop out anyway. Who will these people support? And where who will their supporters back? (Not always the same thing.) We may start to find out this afternoon.
Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Voting starts in the first round ballot for the Conservative leadership contest. Conservative MPs vote in a Commons committee room. The poll closes at 12pm.
Around 1pm: The Conservative 1922 Committee announces the results of the first ballot.
5pm: Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, gives a speech to the Institute for Government.
As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web, although I will be focusing mostly on the Tory leadership contest and the Commons debate. I plan to post a summary when I wrap up at the end of the day.
You can read all the latest Guardian politics articles here. Here is the Politico Europe round-up of this morning’s political news. And here is the PoliticsHome list of today’s top 10 must-reads.
If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter, I’m on @AndrewSparrow.
I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.
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