Whoever becomes the next Tory leader shouldn’t assume they’ll be safe in the job | Andrew Rawnsley

If there’s a star among the four candidates, who this week will be winnowed down to two, they are keeping it well disguised

When I read people referring to the competition to be the next leader of the Tory party as “a beauty contest”, I reach for my red pen. It has more in common with Squid Game, the dystopian survival thriller. With the difference that the winner of this marathon elimination contest will not take home a large sum of money. The prize is to lead – I ought to say try to lead – a Conservative parliamentary group smaller in size than at any time in the long history of the party.

The 121 Tory MPs will this week winnow the field of leadership candidates down from the current four to the two whose names will then be put to the party’s wizened membership. It’s been more than three months since this interminably long contest was announced. Time enough surely for Conservative parliamentarians to come to a view about the wannabe leaders. Yet, canvassing opinion among Tory MPs about who they intend to back, I find a remarkably large proportion of them replying “I don’t know”. And not because they are keeping their preference secret, but because they are genuinely uncertain at this late stage. They often have a fierce conviction about which candidate would be a disaster for their party, but there’s much less confidence that any of the contenders has the potential to be an electoral success.

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