The beauty parade of Conservative leadership hopefuls is finally approaching its end stages. Tory MPs have spent six weeks whittling down six candidates to two, who will now be put to a ballot of party members.

And they saved the biggest shock until last: James Cleverly, who led in the penultimate MP ballot and was the most moderate of the top three, dropped to last place in the final round, meaning it is the two candidates to his right – Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick – who members will decide between.

Cue glee on the Labour side: after a bruising first 100 days, they can barely believe their luck that it’s come down to a close fight between a man who ordered the removal of a cartoon mural designed for children at an asylum seeker reception, and a woman who appeared to say that maternity pay has gone too far then claimed she had been misrepresented. “It looks like Keir’s genie is back at work,” one cabinet minister privately told my Guardian colleagues. “Does the Tory leadership result need to be declared as a gift?” another Labour MP joked. Cleverly’s team have denied they tried to game the result of the members’ ballot by lending votes to their preferred opponent Jenrick in a way that backfired. But it seems likely that his supporters took it upon themselves to switch votes to knock out the candidate they thought posed the biggest risk.

There are aspects of this result for Labour to feel pleased about: there is that old maxim that in a two-party, first-past-the-post system, parties win from the centre. Both Jenrick and........

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