‘Cock up not conspiracy!’ - Inside the downfall of James Cleverly

At about 2.30pm yesterday James Cleverly was with his entourage talking to representatives of the Girl Guides who had a stall for the day in Portcullis House on the parliamentary estate. He seemed relaxed and confident just a like man destined to go through to the final round of the Tory leadership contest.

But already things were going badly wrong for the former home secretary. An hour later Bob Blackman, chairman of the Tory backbench 1922 committee, announced that he had been eliminated from the contest.

It led to the question: How could Mr Cleverly have got two votes less than he had done in the previous round when he had been the clear winner before, and favourite to be Rishi Sunak’s replacement.

Fingers were being pointed to his campaign manager former cabinet minister Grant Shapps - or Mr Spreadsheet as he is often known. Shapps has made a reputation of being able to work out numbers down to the exact detail in previous contests. Had he been responsible for a cunning plan to get rival Robert Jenrick as Cleverly’s main opponent only for the whole thing to backfire?

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Insiders have told The Independent that the allegation is “absolutely not true”. Or as one person said: “Total b****ks!”

But that is not to say they had not been aware of a problem.

“We kept on having MPs who were supporting James coming up to us and saying ‘how do you want me to vote?’,” one person on the campaign noted.

“We would reply ‘for James’. But it was obvious that some of our supporters were freelancing.”

Such was the panic about the consequence of this that Mel Stride, a former leadership rival who had sided with Cleverly, was sent in to urge supporters to stop voting tactically, early in the afternoon. It seems that he was deployed too late.

As one person ruthfully put it: “Just two MPs switching to James would have been enough for him to go through.”

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Instead the Tory membership has a choice of rightwingers Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch.

However, it seems that Jenrick had a lucky escape himself.

In the previous round when Tom Tugendhat had been eliminated Jenrick had gone in as a clear frontrunner but seen his support drop to 31.

One of his team admitted: “We had a few of Robert’s supporters getting over excited about tactical voting.”

While a senior MP supporting Jenrick denied claims - mostly from Ms Badenoch’s camp - that Team Jenrick had been lending votes to try to eliminate her, there is an acknowledgement that “freelancing was a problem”.

“Some MPs were trying to be too clever, especially some of the newbies,” a veteran former minister said.

But the timing worked out for Jenrick.

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One of his supporters said: “I think we all had a shock that Robert might actually not make the final two. It meant that colleagues stopped voting tactically and voted for him.”

It was nevertheless a relief with some of the Team Jenrck members believing overnight on Tuesday going into Wednesday that he “was finished”.

Meanwhile, Team Cleverly now believes his supporters “got over confident and thought they could play tactical games.”

As a number of MPs have noted that with just 121 of them after the election “the margins of error are very small” and it meant that just two MPs ensured Jenrick went though instead of Cleverly.

But as one MP said: “Basically it was cock up not conspiracy.”