These Are the People Who Will Choose Britain’s Next Prime Minister

(Bloomberg) --

On a Tuesday lunchtime, business at the bar in Epsom’s Conservative Club is slow.

Three gray-haired men quietly sip their pints of English ale, surrounded by beer mats, lacquered wood, and a gilt-embossed honors board listing the club’s chairmen dating back to 1890.

In 2019, one issue dominates their conversations, just as it does Britain’s national political debate: Who will become the next leader of their party, and prime minister?

It is in clubs like this one, in a genteel English market town 18 miles southwest of London, that the question will be settled. And with it, the future shape of the British government, and the course of Brexit, will be determined.

The Conservative Party has an estimated 160,000 grassroots members, representing just 0.24% of the U.K. population. These are the people who will vote by post over the next three weeks to make either Boris Johnson, the face of the Brexit campaign, or Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, Britain’s next prime minister.

Whoever wins will take in charge of the U.K. at a perilous time, with just three months to try to wring a better divorce deal from Brussels—and then sell it to a skeptical Parliament—before the country’s scheduled exit from the European Union on Oct. 31.

At the bar, John Sullivan, 73, breaks off from watching cricket on his phone and sips his pint. A former fire-fighter, Sullivan is backing the flamboyant front-runner Johnson over the “gray” Hunt. Johnson, he says, is “a risk” but it’s time to gamble. “It’s like a card game, you get your choices: do I chance that or do I back off?” Sullivan says. “I think we should chance it.”

It’s a theme that comes up repeatedly. Three years after Britain voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum, grassroots Conservatives are tired of Theresa May’s failure to deliver it. Many now see in Johnson’s buccaneering style their best hope of getting Britain out of the EU, even if that means leaving the bloc without a deal, and all the harm to the economy that would bring.

Johnson has been clear. He is ready to take the U.K. out of the EU by the deadline of Oct. 31, with or without a deal—in his words, Halloween must be Brexit Day, “do or die.” Hunt has rejected the hard deadline, saying he would wait a few days if a deal could be done, but insisting at the same time that he is prepared to leave without one if the EU won’t compromise.

John Williams, nicknamed ‘Geordie’ because he’s originally from Newcastle in north-east England, jokes that he joined Epsom’s Conservative club because the beer is cheap. With a billiard table and darts matches, it’s also a social hub for the former soldier.

He voted to leave the EU in 2016, yet is planning to move to Corfu. “I’ve just finished a radiotherapy course for cancer and I haven’t had the results through but I reckon I’ve got three to five years max,” he says. “I want to live out my years with the sun on my back.”

Before he emigrates, Williams will vote for the next Tory leader. He’s inclined toward Johnson. “He is a bit of a buffoon and he tends to put his foot in his mouth,” Williams says. “But at the end of the day I think his heart is in the right place.” Hunt, by contrast, seems “weak” and unwilling to take decisions.

While party bosses are reluctant to publish details about their supporters, surveys have shown the Tory membership is unrepresentative of the wider population. Research by academics at Queen Mary and Sussex universities found 64% of Conservatives are men and they live disproportionately in the south of England. Some 48% of Tory members are also over the age of 65, compared to 18% of the U.K. population.

In the air-conditioned food court of a shopping mall in Epsom town center, Tony Burgess, 81, is drinking a coffee with his wife. He explains he will be voting for Johnson to release the U.K. from its current Brexit limbo because he Britain needs a leader like its wartime prime minister Winston Churchill.

“We need someone sort of Churchillian to dig us out of this mess. As much as I admire Mr Hunt he is too anaemic,” he says. “We need an awkward, shambolic, well-educated, hard-hitting guy to achieve something,” he says.

Burgess is a former director at Barclays Plc, who’s been retired for more than 20 years. He says he isn’t concerned about Britain leaving the EU with no-deal, arguing the situation needs to be “crystalized” one way or another.

Nor is Burgess deterred by reports of difficulties in Johnson’s personal life, such as a late-night argument with his girlfriend at her London apartment, and his track-record of extra-marital affairs.

“That’s his business—I want someone who will deliver,” Burgess says. “We’ve had three years of no delivery and you can talk all you like about morals, but it hasn’t done us any good.”

Brexit has torn up the Conservative Party’s traditional priorities. Polling by YouGov last month found that rank-and-file Tories are willing to sacrifice their own party—and even the union of four countries that make up the United Kingdom—to deliver on the 2016 referendum result.

A survey of 892 Conservative members on June 11-14 found that 61% would accept “significant damage” to the economy in return for leaving the EU; 63% were prepared to allow Scotland to break away from the U.K.; and 54% would rather see the Conservative Party “destroyed” if it means that Brexit is delivered.

In Farnham, Surrey, the district that Hunt represents, it is possible to find Tories who take a different view. “I’m a Remainer,” says Jenny Pitt, 64, a Conservative Party member for 15 years and a Tory voter for far longer. “I think it’s a monumental shame what’s happening to us.” She recalls the moment she learned the U.K. had voted to leave the EU in June 2016. “I cried that morning, I welled up and thought: ‘what have we done?’”

For Pitt, a no-deal divorce would be anathema to the traditions of the Conservative Party. “I think Boris is going to win, but I will be very comfortable in my bed at night if I know I voted against him.”

Yet she remains an exception. There are other reasons beyond Brexit that are motivating Conservatives to turn to Johnson. They need a leader who can defeat the populism of the political left and the right.

In the 2017 general election, May lost her majority in Parliament while the opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn ran a socialist campaign that brought him to the brink of power.

At the same time, the Tories are facing an existential threat from Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, which came top of the national vote share in May’s European Parliament elections and could damage the Conservatives so badly in a general election that Labour wins.

Humanities teacher Patricia Wallis accepts that Johnson is “a bit thin on facts to back up his arguments,” but sees his ability to win elections as more important. The 64 year-old recognizes the burden of responsibility party members bear for choosing the country’s next leader. The result will be declared in the week of July 22.

“I’m so worried about Corbyn getting in, I want someone who can stand up to the Brexit Party,” she says. “Boris has the personality to do it.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tim Ross at tross54@bloomberg.net, Robert Hutton

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