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James Cleverly was eliminated from the Tory leadership race because Robert Jenrick’s team ruthlessly targeted his supporters “who hated Kemi Badenoch”, The Independent can reveal.
The former home secretary looked to have been a certainty for the final two of the contest to go to Conservative members when the penultimate set of results were announced on Tuesday, putting him eight ahead of the previous frontrunner Mr Jenrick.
With Mr Jenrick just one vote ahead of Ms Badenoch and 20 votes to be distributed from the eliminated Tom Tugendhat, his team thought that they were about to fall at the last hurdle.
What followed was a ruthless whipping operation led by Mr Jenrick’s core supporters including campaign manager Danny Kruger, Common Sense group chair Sir John Hayes, One Nation cheerleader John Lamont, Brexiteer Europe Research Group chair Mark Francois, and former minister Neil O’Brien.
A source told The Independent how the operation through Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning transpired.
“We knew from the numbers that two of Robert’s supporters had freelanced and lent their votes to another candidate,” the insider said.
“We identified them and made sure they understood they needed to vote for Robert or else he was out. We passed that message around to others but after the closeness of the previous round it wasn’t really necessary.”
What followed was a dual strategy to win over Tugendhat votes and peel away Cleverly supporters.
They were helped by the fact that only 16 of Mr Cleverly’s 39 in the third round had openly declared for him.
“We knew how people had voted but we knew a lot of them were not firmly attached to James.”
So while Mr Lamont was sent to lead the effort to win over leftish Tories who had backed Mr Tugendhat, picking up several, others focused on Mr Cleverly’s supporters.
“What we did was to go to a group who we knew hate Kemi,” explained an insider.
“There were five or six we knew could be persuaded to lend Robert their votes. So we went and told them, ‘James is going through anyway can you lend us your vote to stop Kemi?’”
The ruthless pursuit continued until late into the early afternoon with the result set to be announced at 3.30pm.
Team Cleverly had picked up what was happening and started to panic, sending out former leadership rival Mel Stride to persuade MPs not to vote tactically.
As 3.30pm came, Mr Jenrick was standing in his office in parliament with his team and two senior MPs in his campaign – Sir John and Mr Kruger.
As 1922 Committee chair Bob Blackman announced the results they still did not know if it had worked.
First up was Ms Badenoch with 42. There was a moment of despair in Mr Jenrick’s office.
“You’re f***ed!” he was told by someone in the room.
“We did not know where she had got her votes from, it was more than we expected.”
But then Mr Cleverly was announced as having 37 votes, with Mr Jenrick on 41 and through to the final face-off.
Cue relief and hugging in Mr Jenrick’s office. Followed by astonishment at what had happened.
“We know we got five MPs to swap from James to Robert and that made the difference,” a supporter told The Independent.
