Remaining leadership hopefuls Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch show true face of the current Conservative Party, says Euan McColm

The only surprising thing about the elimination of James Cleverly from the Conservative Party leadership contest was that so many people were surprised by it.

After an impressive enough conference speech, the shadow home secretary had become the bookies’ favourite to succeed Rishi Sunak. He even led the field in the last round of voting in this seemingly interminable race.

So, the decision of Tory MPs to offer members the choice between Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch was instantly analysed as a mistake. Politicians and commentators alike pored over and picked apart the removal of Cleverly from the running, with many concluding that some kind of vote-lending scheme had backfired. Why else would Tory MPs have voted to remove the most moderate of the remaining candidates?

I fear there has been a bit of projection going on in much of this analysis. I prefer the simpler explanation, which is that the final two candidates, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, more authentically represent the current Conservative group at Westminster.

Cleverly is the hero of a centrist’s fever dream in which his political past is forgotten. The reality is that the Conservatives in the House of Commons are every bit as right-wing as those final two would suggest.

It doesn’t matter to Tory MPs that both Badenoch and Jenrick have run woefully bad campaigns. The main thing is they’re on the right and willing to take their party further in that direction if necessary. Or even if not.

The Conservatives’ next leader will not be the party’s next Prime Minister. The Tories are currently in that difficult post defeat phase when they should be expected to make poor decisions.

We witnessed this phenomenon in the years after the Tories defeat by Tony Blair’s Labour in 1997 when, at various points, the party considered Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith viable prospects for the premiership.

The Tories will, once members choose either Jenrick or Badenoch, continue to endure a period of instability and growing irrelevance.

I’m not signed up to the idea that James Cleverly would have been the Tories’ saviour. He’s affable, sure, but he was also a key figure in the last Conservative government, who spent much of his time touring TV studios defending the often indefensible behaviour of his colleagues. Cleverly is a good soldier but not much more.

During his speech to Tory conference, Cleverly suggested it was time for his party to be more “normal”. That’s an idea whose time has not yet come in the Conservative Party.

For now, the delusion that the party was humiliated by Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour at the last general election because it wasn’t Tory enough remains widespread.

And so we may look forward to either Jenrick, the man who, as immigration minister, ordered the cover-up of cartoons on the walls of a centre dealing with children, or Badenoch, who briefly became working class while in a summer job at McDonalds, dragging their party further to the right.

Jenrick lacks charisma and energy yet is treated by a large swathe of the party as if he was the reincarnation of JFK. Badenoch, on the other hand, has bags of charisma and energy but also happens to be a crank on a number of issues.

Either candidate will make for entertaining viewing for anyone who doesn’t care about the future of the Tory party.

Already, there is speculation among some Tory MPs and MSPs about who will follow either Jenrick or Badenoch as leader. Their shared assumption is that whichever wins, they will fail to turn around the party’s fortunes and that poor results in council elections in England will be enough to see them off.

Some of those politicians believe Cleverly will return to lead the Conservatives into the next general election.

But what if that’s just a neat story for people who listen to politics podcasts? What if the Conservative Party has fundamentally changed?

What if Jenrick, a wonky 3D print of Donald Trump’s US presidential running mate JD Vance, is the authentic face of modern conservatism?

The (occasional) presence of Nigel Farage in the House of Commons has got a lot of Tory MPs spooked. They see Reform snapping up their voters and, understandably, want to get them back.

The inevitable shift right of the Conservatives under either Jenrick or Badenoch will present a dilemma for the newly elected leader of the party in Scotland, Russell Findlay.

With the constitutional question now off the table, the Scottish Tories have struggled to maintain their relevance. The party – currently the second largest at Holyrood – is expected to come third or even fourth in the 2026 Holyrood election.

There is a lot of chatter in Scottish Tory circles just now about how Findlay should distance himself from whoever succeeds Rishi Sunak.

That’s all well and good but the Reform Party are not an irrelevance in Scotland. Under the Holyrood voting system, Nigel Farage’s party are expected to pick up a number of seats in 2026.

So what does Findlay do? Does he try to pull the Scottish Tories towards the centre and leave space on the right for Reform or does he tack right and give up on the centre ground battle?

If I were the leader of the Scottish Tories, I’d be focused on one key issue – the impact of trans rights activists on women’s single-sex spaces.

The Conservatives are the only political party on the same page as the majority of voters when it comes to the influence of gender ideology on policy making. While SNP, Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat MSPs cheered on utterly unworkable reforms to the gender recognition act, it was Tory members who led the case against allowing anyone to self-ID into the legally recognised sex of their choosing.

Russell Findlay may find this issue is one upon which the Conservatives can build a decent Holyrood election campaign, regardless of whether Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch wins the leadership.