The Conservatives should not spend too long on a protracted leadership debate that would be a “waste of time” and could risk appearing self-indulgent, the Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen has said.
Houchen, who is now the most senior Conservative in office, said the party was well aware of the potential leadership candidates and said he could not see why a contest would need to run much past party conference in October.
“If we navel-gaze for too long that’s going to turn off the public even more, because it again feeds into that perception that we’re more concerned about the ongoings of the Conservative party rather than what the public care about, which is: how do we help improve their lives?” he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg programme.
No candidates have yet formally declared but those who are privately gathering support for a run include the former home secretaries Priti Patel and James Cleverly, the former business secretary Robert Jenrick, the former security minister Tom Tugendhat and the former business secretary Kemi Badenoch, whom several polls have named as the party members’ favourite.
Houchen said he had been contacted by a number of leadership candidates but said he had not decided yet who to endorse. A number of MPs and former MPs have said they believed the party needed a longer period of introspection, perhaps as long as six months.
“We do need to get there relatively quickly, because without a successful and competent opposition, I think parliament, in and of itself, starts to break down, doesn’t work as effectively as it could do,” Houchen said. “We need to make sure we find the right leader to navigate us through what is going to be a very, very difficult time to try and unite the party
“The next couple of years is going to be very difficult for the Conservative party to find itself again, what it means to govern effectively, what it wants to offer to the public over the next four or five years. And so the next 18 months are going to be a treacherous one for the Conservative party.”
He said the party conference should be “there or thereabouts” the time for appointing a new leader. “I think certainly in the first half of October, we need to be getting into a place where we do have a leader in place,” he said. “I think the honest answer is, we know, roughly … the likely candidates who are going to put themselves forward for the leadership contest … it’s pretty obvious.
“They’re pretty well known to the Conservative party. We roughly know where they stand in the Conservative party spectrum … But the idea we need a long and protracted process that gets into some sort of existential crisis about what the Conservative party stands for and what these leadership contenders stand for would be a waste of time.”
Houchen, who had been a key support in Rishi Sunak’s leadership campaign but was previously close to Boris Johnson, said he did not know who would get his support. “Absolutely, a number of the contenders have already been contacting me. And over the coming weeks I’ll be meeting with them because they’ve asked to meet with me to discuss their intentions but we’ll have to wait and see what happens,” he said.
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“The Conservative party is very different to the one it was just a few weeks ago. And so, while those people are familiar to us, we also need to understand what their positions are on rebuilding the Conservative party.”
A new poll of ConservativeHome readers put Badenoch as the favourite, ahead of Jenrick, the two candidates who are said to have gathered the most support from MPs. Jenrick wrote on the website on Friday proposing big internal party reforms in order to help rebuild.
Braverman, the hardline former home secretary, is said to have lost critical support in the party to Jenrick and comes in fourth in the poll, behind the centre-right favourite Tugendhat, a former chair of the foreign affairs select committee. Patel, a close ally of Johnson, has support of just 3%.