Election time at the Clown College

While the public couldn't be less interested, the newspapers are still trying to make the Tory leadership contest seem compelling.

Previously: Pigs sign partnership with the meat grinder
Condé Nast is the latest company to capitulate to OpenAI with a deal to have its content chewed up and regurgitated.

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Wanting to be the leader of the Conservative Party at this point in its history should be considered a very niche kind of humiliation fetish. But while most of the British public has averted their eyes, political reporters and columnists must look directly at the unsettling spectacle being put on by those craving to be the top Tory in a much-diminished pile of Conservative MPs.

Listening to the radio earlier, I caught a report from one unfortunate journalist sent to witness the launch of Tom Tugendhat’s campaign. It focused less on what he said in his speech — a too little, too late apology for his party’s failures across 14 years in government — and more on the merch: Tom Tugendhat foam hands and little bags of M&Ms branded with Tom Tugendhat’s face.

Over at the Telegraph, Tim Stanley took a similar line, comparing the catering at the James Cleverly launch (“Tea and cardboard cupcakes”) with the spread provided by the frontrunner Kemi Badenoch (“an apple, spinach and ginger smoothie that suggested a colonic in a glass but went down rather well”). The Times sketch writer Tom Peck made sure to mention Badenoch’s Danish pastries but seems to have kept clear of Cleverly’s disappointing cupcakes.

If you’ve eaten recently, you should probably skip the paragraph in Stanley’s sketch which discusses the Tory taste for a stern nanny:

Those who say Badenoch is too abrasive to be party leader forget that there’s a powerful part of the Tory psyche that very much likes being told off by a strong woman (preferably when handcuffed), and the more she castigated her colleagues for abandoning conservatism the more they enjoyed it.

While Peck, working for a paper that doesn’t need to pick its preferred Tory leader yet, could mock Cleverly and Badenoch in equal measure, it’s clear the Telegraph has made its choice. Stanley went for a painful pun (“Talk about a Kemical Reaction”) and praised “the Culture War Queen… [for saying] What We Believe”, while the latest episode of The Daily T podcast is titled “Why Kemi Badenoch has the ‘X factor’”.

Over at The Sun, which endorsed Labour as late as it possibly could in the general election, news stories highlight the line that Badenoch is “the new Thatcher” and the leader column conveniently suggests that the Tory party needs… a new Thatcher:

The Tories cannot indulge a “continuity” candidate . . . someone more inclined to talk tough than act. Someone obsessed by focus groups, how ­policies might play on Twitter and what a great operator Tony Blair was. Margaret Thatcher had unshakable principles, an iron-clad belief system which informed every decision.

If that kind of grim daydreaming doesn’t make you queasy enough, you can always head to the i where Ian Birrell indulges in some FBPE-style fantasy politics declaring:

Clearly the best candidate with a personal story of substance and potential to attract swing voters in the middle ground who determine elections is Tom Tugendhat… 

Even with the Conservative Party finally out of power, the quest for the ‘good Tory’ continues unabated. If, as i’s feature on the leadership contest suggests, Cleverly and Tugendhat are “locked in their own battle for the moderate vote”, it’s hardly a surprise that new research suggests voters think the Tories are “weird”. Those are the most normal guys they’ve got to offer?

For The Guardian, John Crace had fun with the sheer pointlessness of trudging over to the Tory leadership launches:

In the basement of the former War Office, a few assorted Tories and journalists had gathered for James Cleverly. A man with an unerring – if unintentional – sense of comic timing. His launch was to be a collector’s item. One that at its apogee was watched by all of 2,600 people on X. So a niche entertainment. But if you missed it, you might be able to watch on catchup.

That was the high point of that sketch, written by a man who thinks that dubbing Cleverly “Jimly Dimly” is the height of comedic achievement. His analysis of Badenoch boils down to the fact that she lies and her supporters like it.

A common trait of all the columns and sketches dedicated to the Tory leadership contest is a sense of shrugging, a choking air of ‘will this do’. The fact that only one spot on the Telegraph home page — Stanley’s sketch — was taken up by a story about the Conservative leadership contest as I was writing this edition says it all. Even the Telegraph, practically a Tory party fanzine, knows it’s a squabble over a pointless prize, the Iain Duncan Smith Cup for Political Irrelevance. The winner will earn the opportunity to lose the next election by a slightly smaller margin than the one before.

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