Priti Patel loses battle for Tory leadership, has a long way to go

Dame Priti Patel, the only Indian-origin hope in the race to replace Rishi Sunak as the leader of the British Conservative and Unionist Party, has crashed out at the very first hurdle, gaining the fewest votes from fellow Tory MPs.

Patel, a former home minister who was tough on immigration and the founder of the controversial Rwanda plan, had positioned herself to the right of the Conservative party. But she only got 14 out of the 121 Tory MPs to vote for her.

Robert Jenrick emerges as frontrunner

Robert Jenrick, a former immigration minister and her rival among the six candidates for the right-wing votes, emerged as the frontrunner, receiving the backing of 28 MPs.

Following the Conservative party’s defeat in the general election in July this year, former prime minister Sunak announced that he would stand down from the position of the leader of the party as soon as his successor was appointed.

Sunak, at 44, became the first non-white, Indian-origin, Hindu prime minister of Britain in October 2022 when Liz Truss resigned from the hot seat just 45 days after she was appointed.

How Tories elect leader

Internal Tory party elections for leadership are long and painstaking and are controlled by the 1922 Committee, a group of all backbench Conservative MPs chaired by a senior backbencher.

The new chairman, Bob Blackman, announced the leadership election process on July 22 and assured that a new leader would be in place on November 2. Till then Sunak will remain both leader of the party and Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons.

Tory party elections happen in two stages. First, MPs need to be nominated by 10 Tory MPs to become a candidate. For this leadership race, six candidates gained enough nominations, Patel being one of them.

Four MPs still in race

Throughout the summer, candidates pulled out all stops to convince their fellow MPs that they were the right person for the job.

On September 4, the 121 Tory MPs voted in a secret ballot at the party headquarters for their preferred candidate. This was when Patel was eliminated after getting the lowest number of votes. A second round of voting took place on September 10 for the remaining five candidates and Mel Stride, the former work and pensions minister, was eliminated.

The four candidates left – Kemi Badenoch, former business secretary and the bookmaker’s favourite to win, James Cleverly, former foreign secretary, Tom Tugendhat and Jenrick – will make their case to the Tory members at the party’s annual conference in Birmingham at the end of September. Between October 9 and 10, Conservative MPs will vote to eliminate two more candidates.

Sunak bypassed process

In Stage 2 of the election process, the final duo will face a ballot of the 1,72,000 Conservative party paid up members. Members voting will close at 5 pm on October 31 and Sunak’s replacement will be announced on November 2.

Sunak became leader of the party without having to face the members’ ballot in October 2022 as the he had already lost it earlier that year to Truss and a large section Tory MPs did not want to risk grassroots members derailing their plan to elevate Sunak. Hence Stage 2 of the election process was bypassed in that instance.

Challenges for new leader

Patel bowed out of the contest with the plea to respect party members saying she had put party reform at the heart of her pitch for leadership.

In the last four years, the Tory party was beset with scams, scandals, groupism, inner party wrangling and a leadership crisis. By July this year the public including loyal Tory voters were fed up with the party and ditched them at the ballot box.

The next Conservative leader will have to reform and unite a divided party as well as rebuild its reputation with the public and be able to present a serious choice to the electorate at the next general election in five years.

Why Priti doesn’t fit the bill

The fact that Patel was dumped in the first round of the leadership contest did not come as a surprise to many. A former prime minister Boris Johnson favourite, Patel was seen as one of the old guards and had been embroiled in a couple of scandals of her own and thereby sullied her image.

The new Tory MPs are looking for a fresh face with a decisive break from the past, and Patel had far too much baggage.

Patel, 52, is a second-generation Indian immigrant whose parents Sushil and Anjana migrated to the UK in the 1960s from Kampala in Uganda. All four of her grandparents were from Gujarat, and Patel herself is a fangirl of fellow Gujarati Narendra Modi.

A Gujarati Modi fan

On the eve of his victory in the 2014 general election, Patel lodged a complaint with the BBC alleging one-sided coverage critical of the Indian prime minister. In return, Patel was given the ‘Jewels of Gujarat’ award in January 2015 in Ahmedabad.

Her parliamentary career began in 2010 when she was elected to the safe Conservative seat of Witham in Essex. She was considered to be part of the Tory’s ‘new right’ and in 2015 Patel became the poster girl of ‘Vote Leave’ during the Brexit campaign. It was then that she came close to future prime minister Johnson.

Too soon to write her off

In July 2019, Johnson appointed Patel as home secretary and she became the first Indian origin person to hold one of the four Great Offices of State. Patel remained loyal to Johnson till the end and he rewarded her with a life peerage just as he was forced to demit the prime minister’s office.

For the next five years Patel will spend her time being a backbencher Opposition MP, unlikely to find a place in the new shadow cabinet that will be formed by the new leader of the Conservative party. However, that does not say that her career in politics is over.

Considering the bloodbath that the Tories saw on July 4, the fact that she ran and was elected MP shows she is a survivor and here for the long-haul.