Polling expert John Curtice believes neither Kemi Badenoch nor Robert Jenrick will be able to win back voters and lead the Tories to electoral victory.
The long race to replace Rishi Sunak as the Conservative Party leader is now in its final round and party members have until the end of the month to vote for one of the two remaining candidates.
It comes after the more centrist candidate and then-frontrunner, James Cleverly, was unexpectedly voted out of the contest in the final MPs’ ballot earlier this week.
As the party faithful try to select a candidate who can pull the party back from the brink of their historic electoral defeat back in July, Professor John Curtice examined their pros and cons for The Independent.
He wrote: “Despite their ideological stance, neither Ms Badenoch nor Mr Jenrick is necessarily well set to heal the electoral divide on the right.”
Both are on the right of the party; Badenoch has often slammed “woke” ideas and recently claimed “not all cultures are equally valid”, while Jenrick has been repeatedly calling for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to help the country crack down on immigration.
But, according to Curtice, they are both “unknown quantities” for most of the public.
Indeed, an Ipsos UK poll from August found 62% of Brits surveyed were not interested in following who would replace Sunak.
He added that they do not appear to understand why the Tories performed so poorly in July, and so are unlikely to try and take the steps “needed for their party to regain voters’ trust”.
He said: “Both candidates appear to believe the fault lies in a failure of the last government to be true to Conservative values.”
But, Curtice noted, that it’s clear from the polls the “party’s precipitous fall from grace was not occasioned by a failure to be truly Conservative” but by Partygate and Liz Truss’s mini-Budget.
And, according to the pollster, neither of them are strong enough to even win back all of the votes the Tories lost to far-right group Reform in July.
He added: “Still, as largely unknown quantities, perhaps either Ms Badenoch or Mr Jenrick will prove able to surprise us – though in order to do so, they are both certainly going to have to reveal a wider range of political talents than they have so far.”
The Tories currently have just 121 seats in parliament, the lowest total ever recorded in the party’s history.