Tory MPs to choose final two leadership candidates for members’ ballot – UK politics live

Robert Jenrick, the bookmakers’ favourite prior to the Tory conference, has implied he is victim of ‘horse trading’

Good morning. Keir Starmer is taking PMQs today, for the first time since the conference season recess and the internal No 10 reshuffle that saw his chief of staff, Sue Gray, in effect sacked. But there may be even more interest in what Bob Blackman, chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee, has to say at 3.30pm, when he announces the names of the two Tory leadership candidates who will go to the ballot of members.

One of them is about 99.999% certain to be James Cleverly. The other will be either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick. They are both candidates for the Tory right, but Badenoch is a lifelong, conviction rightwinger, very popular with Tory members, while Jenrick is someone elected to parliament as a Cameroon moderniser who says he has been radicalised into favouring ECHR withdrawal by his experience in a Home Office unable to control irregular migration.

There’s always horse trading, OK, in the final stages ….

I’ve been around long enough to know that in the last few votes in these leadership contests there’s always people moving around votes and so on.

In this leadership contest over the last few months I think I’ve been the only candidate who has set out specific, clear policies to tackle the big issues facing our country – the NHS, how do we grow the economy, how do we tackle immigration, secure our borders

Because I think it’s so important that the Conservative party gets back onto the common ground of British politics, addressing the things that the public really care about.

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