Kemi Badenoch has received a useful endoresement this morning. Iain Duncan Smith, a former party leader, posted a message on social media this morning saying he was backing her because she was capable of facing up to the “hard truths from that terrible election result”. He said:

As today is the last parliamentary round to decide the final two contenders, I think it’s right to say who I hope will become the next leader of the @Conservatives Party.

That person must be capable of returning the Party to its central values and core beliefs. Who recognises why millions of Conservative voters deserted us in July, feeling that the Party in government was no longer behaving like the one they voted for overwhelmingly in 2019.

The individual who does not reach for the default easy comfort blanket of our past achievements but faces up to the hard truths from that terrible election result, and has the humility to learn from it as well as the strength to do something about it.

Most of all, the individual who is not just the right person for today, but who can grow with the Party over the next five years, so that by 2029 the electorate will be able to see what has been achieved, that the Conservative Party has completed its journey of repair and offers a real alternative to this dysfunctional Labour government, and once again is fit to govern.

I believe that person to be @KemiBadenoch and I shall be voting for her today.

The line about not reaching for the “default easy comfort blanket of our past achievements” is a clear jibe at James Cleverly, who has been talking most about what the Tories achieved in office, and arguably least about how they should change going ahead.

Good morning. Keir Starmer is taking PMQs today, for the first time since the conference season recess and the internal No 10 reshuffle that saw his chief of staff, Sue Gray, in effect sacked. But there may be even more interest in what Bob Blackman, chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee, has to say at 3.30pm, when he announces the names of the two Tory leadership candidates who will go to the ballot of members.

One of them is about 99.999% certain to be James Cleverly. The other will be either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick. They are both candidates for the Tory right, but Badenoch is a lifelong, conviction rightwinger, very popular with Tory members, while Jenrick is someone elected to parliament as a Cameroon moderniser who says he has been radicalised into favouring ECHR withdrawal by his experience in a Home Office unable to control irregular migration.

Until the Tory conference, Jenrick was the clear bookmakers’ favourite. But today he is the candidate struggling the most.

Jenrick was only one vote ahead of Badenoch yesterday and no one is confident about predicting what will happen today. That is because Tory MPs are not just voting for who they want to be leader. They are voting for who they want to be in the final two (mindful of who they want as leader), and who they don’t want in the final two (because stopping the candidate they hate often matters more than backing the person they like).

In a last minute attempt to win over some extra votes, Jenrick gave an interview to Kay Burley on Sky News this morning. (Badenoch’s team probably decided that the thing most likely to help her campaign would be keeping her off the media – she often finds it hard to get through an interview without patronising or arguing with the presenter in a manner that reinforces claims she’s divisive and abrasive.) When Burley asked Jenrick why Cleverly did so well yesterday, Jenrick implied that he was the vicitm of “horse trading” by MPs swapping votes to keep him out. He replied:

There’s always horse trading, OK, in the final stages ….

I’ve been around long enough to know that in the last few votes in these leadership contests there’s always people moving around votes and so on.

When Burley asked if he was implying that the Badenoch camp was lending votes to Cleverly, to keep Jenrick off the final shortlist, Jenrick replied: “I don’t know.”

Neither do we, and perhaps we never will. Strategic vote swapping does happen in ballots like this, but people almost never admit it, and it can be risky. And, while sometimes it involves the campaign manager of the candidate in the lead actively asking a handful of supporters to vote for the weaker opponent, it can just involve MPs freelancing. Around half of Tory MPs have not declared publicly who they are supporting, and some of them will be keeping that information private even from colleagues.

But if there is vote swapping happening today, Jenrick is more likely to be the beneficiary than the victim. The most recent survey of Tory members suggest Badenoch would beat Cleverly in the final ballot, but Jenrick wouldn’t, and so the Cleverly team (the only ones theoretically with spare votes to divvy up) have an incentive to get Jenrick over the line.

In his interview, Jenrick also claimed that he would move the Tories back onto the “common ground” of British politics – a pitch to the centre designed to appeal to the 20 Tory MPs who voted yesterday for Tom Tugendhat, who is now eliminated. Jenrick said:

In this leadership contest over the last few months I think I’ve been the only candidate who has set out specific, clear policies to tackle the big issues facing our country – the NHS, how do we grow the economy, how do we tackle immigration, secure our borders

Because I think it’s so important that the Conservative party gets back onto the common ground of British politics, addressing the things that the public really care about.

And the polling suggests that, of the candidates, I am the best placed to win back the millions of votes to we lost to Reform, and the votes to be lost on our left to the Lib Dems.

If we don’t do that, then there’s no future for our party, and we will be stuck in the political wilderness for years to come.

So the party needs now somebody who is professional, who’s competent, and is focused on the most salient issues, the things that your viewers really care about. That is me. That’s what I want to do for the Conservative party.

Here is the agenda for the day.

11.30am: Bridget Phillipson takes questions in the Commons in her capacity as minister for women and equalities.

Noon: Keir Starmer faces Rishi Sunak at PMQs.

After 12.30pm: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, opens the second reading of the renters’ rights bill.

1.30pm: Tory MPs start voing in the final parliamentary ballot in the Tory leadership contest.

3.30pm: Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 Committee, announces the results of the Tory leadership ballot.

Also, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, is in the Middle East, visiting Bahrain and Jordan.

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