Liz Truss was the biggest winner after the fourth round of voting among Conservative MPs and she is now the bookies’ favourite to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister. She must first push Penny Mordaunt or Rishi Sunak out of the way to become one of two candidates to progress to a ballot of the entire party membership.
Sunak’s 118 votes leave him just one short of the 119 needed to secure his place on the ballot and the focus at Westminster is on a battle for second place between Truss and Mordaunt. But the movement of votes between the third round of voting on Monday and the fourth on Tuesday highlights how difficult it is to predict the final outcome.
Tom Tugendhat came last on Monday with 30 votes and his supporters, many of whom were from the One Nation, liberal wing of the party, were expected to move predominantly to Sunak and Mordaunt. Some were thought likely to go to Kemi Badenoch, the other maverick in the final five, but very few to Truss, who is Johnson’s unofficially anointed inheritor.
But when the votes were counted, Truss was up 15, Mordaunt by 10, Sunak by three and Badenoch by one. What happened?
One possibility is that Tugendhat’s former supporters were not the only ones who were shifting their allegiance. While some of his votes may have gone to Badenoch, some of hers may have moved to Truss in an effort to shore up the strongest remaining candidate on the right.
Mordaunt’s extra 10 votes could have come directly from Tugendhat but Sunak’s three looks like an implausibly meagre haul. This has revived speculation about votes being loaned from one candidate to another in an effort to shape the final field to the frontrunner’s advantage.
[ Tory MPs to pick final two leadership candidates as Kemi Badenoch eliminatedOpens in new window ]
There were accusations of such sleight of hand after the final round in the MPs’ stage of the 2019 leadership contest when Jeremy Hunt moved from two votes behind Michael Gove to two votes ahead of him. Suspicious minds concluded that Boris Johnson preferred to face the Remainer Hunt rather than the Brexiteer Gove in the membership ballot and that Gavin Williamson, a master of the dark arts of politics, had helped to deliver that outcome.
Williamson is working on Sunak’s campaign, along with four other former chief whips, and there is a suspicion that the former chancellor would prefer to face Truss than Mordaunt. A YouGov poll on Tuesday suggested that Sunak would lose to either woman but to Truss by a wider margin.
So it makes no sense for Sunak to be working to put Truss in second place. Unless he knows something we don’t.