How do Conservative Party members rank prospective leadership candidates? A small-scale experiment

The Conservative Party is in a state of crisis. The HMS Britain is heading towards the iceberg of Brexit and instead of deciding on a route past the danger the crew seem more concerned with choosing a new captain.

The failed December 2018 leadership challenge against Theresa May secured her position within the party from a formal challenge for another year. Still, rumours abound that she will resign should the Withdrawal Agreement fail to pass… again.

There has been a lot of interest in who the next leader of the party will be. Most polling on the issue asks a simple question along the lines of ‘Who should be the next leader of the Conservative Party, after Theresa May?’.

The main problem with this approach, however, is that it completely misrepresents how the Conservative leader is chosen. Instead of members getting a wide choice of MPs to vote for, Conservative MPs whittle down the number of candidates to two, and the members choose the leader from those final two. For a history of this process, see the House of Commons Library Briefing, and the Institute for Government’s compilation of previous results.

So, it’s all well and good Boris winning 18% of the ConHome member vote, for example, but if 82% of members absolutely hated him and would never vote for him, it’s a meaningless result.

What I wanted to know was how Conservative…