Conservative MPs go looking for their own ‘fresh start’ in Penny Mordaunt

And so the Tory leadership saga continues. The first ballot of Conservative MPs saw Rishi Sunak come out on top. The former Chancellor received the backing of 88 MPs, ahead of party membership favourite Penny Mordaunt on 67. Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zahawi were knocked out of the contest after failing to reach the threshold of 30 MPs. A second round of voting will take place today, with candidates required to meet the same threshold to progress. (If all of the leadership hopefuls reach that threshold, the candidate with the fewest supporters will be dropped.)

Labour seems to think a Sunak victory is a distinct possibility if yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions is anything to go by. Keir Starmer singled Sunak and Zahawi out for criticism over their tax affairs and specifically called out the former Chancellor over his attempts to distance himself from the Johnson administration. The Labour leader scoffed at Sunak’s pledge to rebuild the economy, asking Boris Johnson if he could think of “any jobs his former Chancellor may have had that mean he bears some responsibility for an economy that he now claims is broken”.

But what Labour really want to be talking about is the extent to which the leadership contest is distracting the Tory Party from its day job – the minor task of running the country. Addressing the Commons yesterday, Wes Streeting said it was a “disgrace” that new Health Secretary Steve Barclay had not turned up to respond to Labour’s urgent question on the ambulance crisis. The Shadow Health Secretary also highlighted that Home Secretary Priti Patel had failed to attend the home affairs select committee earlier in the day, declaring: “This isn’t even a government in office, let alone in power.” He accused ministers of being “too busy making endorsements for fantasy candidates with far-fetched promises”.

Thangam Debbonaire emphasised this morning how “chaotic” the government is currently. “They’re all over the place,” the shadow leader of the House of Commons told Sky News viewers. And, as Labour has been so fond of saying in recent months, the culture is set at the top. The Prime Minister cryptically suggested that yesterday’s PMQs may be his last, despite there being one more session left before recess and the change in Conservative leadership in early September. His press secretary said there were “no plans” for him to skip the final session but did not explicitly rule it out, telling journalists that Johnson would be doing PMQs next week “as things currently stand”.

Even so, the increasingly blasé approach of Johnson and his posse to governing the country strengthens Labour’s argument that a “fresh start” is needed. And given Mordaunt’s significant poll lead among Tory members, there seems to be widespread acceptance of this fact. Selecting Mordaunt as Johnson’s successor is obviously not the fresh start Labour wants. But choosing a relative nobody, only peripherally involved in the current administration, would demonstrate the wider Conservative Party’s desire to have a clean break from Johnson.