The question “Are Tory MPs rigging leadership votes with dirty tricks?” is often on a par with “Is the Pope Catholic?” or “Do bears shit in the woods?” It’s obvious and happens all the time, even if it’s covert.
So it comes as no surprise to anyone that there have been allegations of vote rigging in the first round of the Conservative Party leadership race.
Suspicions revolve around former Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride, who is seen as a good guy but not a serious candidate to replace Rishi Sunak.
Somehow, she managed to gain the support of enough Conservative MPs to put her on the first ballot paper, and then she received 16 votes in the first round, one more than Priti Patel, meaning the former home secretary was eliminated.
This was achieved despite Mr Stride not yet having launched a formal leadership campaign.
Mr Stride’s target now is former security minister Tom Tugendhat, who received 17 votes in the first round and could only get one more.
Essentially, vote rigging for the Conservative leadership is the practice of allowing one of the leading candidates to defeat a more serious rival by voting for a less popular candidate.
This can happen because Conservative Party MPs decide who the final two people will be before members vote in an open contest.
There were strong claims that this had happened before. Infamously, MPs supporting Boris Johnson switched to Jeremy Hunt to prevent Michael Gove from finishing in the final two in 2019. Mr Gove was seen as a greater threat to Mr Johnson.
Mr Gove was also rumoured to have lost in 2016 because the Theresa May camp allegedly voted for Andrea Leadsom. Ms Leadsom was such a weak candidate that members dropped out of the race altogether before they even had a chance to choose between the final two candidates.
Long ago, Iain Duncan Smith’s supporters voted for Ken Clarke to reach the final two in a bid to eliminate overwhelming favourite Michael Portillo.
Sometimes it can backfire. Rishi Sunak’s team allegedly voted for Liz Truss to stop Penny Mordaunt in July 2022 but still lost.
What is now in doubt is the continued presence in the House of Commons of two former deputy leaders, Gavin Williamson and Julian Smith. They have previously been accused of tactical voting games. To be fair, Mr Williamson insisted Independent He said he was staying out of this leadership race.
But it is alleged that Robert Jenrick’s camp voted for Mr Stride primarily to eliminate his main rival on the right, Dame Priti Patel, and will do the same to oust Mr Tugendhat.
Although Dame Priti took the defeat with incredible graciousness, some of her supporters made angry claims.
It was alleged that three votes were shifted from Mr Jenrick to Mr Stride; each camp had calculated that Mr Stride had 13 supporters, not 16.
Team Badenoch now appear to be making a similar claim against the Jenrick camp, perhaps in an attempt to tarnish his name after he surprised everyone by beating Kemi Badenoch by six votes, 28 to 22. There is clear concern that Ms Badenoch, who has long been the bookies’ favourite to replace Mr Sunak and is top of the membership polls, could suffer the same fate as Mr Portillo in 2001, before members had a chance to vote for her.
The irony of this is that the former culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, has been claiming for months that there was a “conspiracy” involving Mr Gove and his backroom operative Dougie Smith to appoint Ms Badenoch as the next Conservative Party leader. That plot now appears to be failing – if it ever happened at all.
However, figures within Team Jenrick were stunned by the claims, saying: Independent that they were “complete bastards”.
There may be something to that. After the first round of votes were counted and Mr Jenrick emerged as the clear winner, his response was delayed because, as his spokesman admitted, “we need to pick his jaw up off the floor first”, he was clearly bewildered.
The team had calculated that Mr. Stride would receive 24 votes, and while they were trying to figure out where those extra four came from, they were faced with the accusation that they had given Mr. Stride three votes.
Although dirty tricks were played out in previous elections, serious questions have arisen as to whether this will happen this time, as the Conservative Party’s parliamentary seats have fallen to just 121.
As one Team Jenrick insider put it: “There are now very few MPs to play with. Literally, one or two people changing could be the difference between Remain and No Remain. To suggest that we voted because we didn’t vote is complete nonsense.
“We were expecting to be second after Kemi [Badenoch] “And we were planning our messaging that we had the momentum to win. We needed as many MPs as we could get, so there was no interest in voting.”
Others have suggested that it was actually Team Badenoch who lent the votes. But if this is true, it has done great damage to her campaign by placing her in a distant second place, especially as the Patel vote is expected to be split mostly between Mr Jenrick and James Cleverly.
Miss Badenoch, who made it to the last four, may now struggle in third place.
So while Conservative Party leadership elections are almost always characterised by intrigue, this leadership election was perhaps the most unusual: a relatively clean race.