Not criminal enough. Yet.

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With the elimination of Priti Patel from the Tory leadership race, the party has lost what, on the face of it, appeared to be one of their best chances of continuing the run of selecting only the naughtiest of candidates for the top post. Being sacked for conducting her own foreign policy and being found to have bullied civil servants (even if let off by her then boss) are the sort of misdeeds which ought to have elevated her to the top of the list given her party’s recent predilection for rogues and rule-breakers. She might have been pretty nasty in her period as Home Secretary and rather too fond of Farage, but amongst the Tory Party membership those were supposed to be assets.

Whilst May’s naughty doings – or at least the ones she owned up to – were limited to running through a farmer’s wheatfield, her successor set the bar high for those who would follow. And Johnson, of course, did indeed set a really high bar. Being sacked for lying – twice – being involved in a (failed) plot to beat up a journalist, making up stories for newspapers, to say nothing of being fined for breaches of his own Covid regulations: it was a tough act to follow. Whilst his successor, Liz Truss, had what has subsequently been revealed to be a somewhat tenuous grip on reality, to say nothing of a weird obsession with cheese, she really couldn’t compete. That was probably one of the factors in the brevity of her tenure in the role. Sunak did rather better, being fined for both breaching the Covid regulations and the seat belt law, even if his household benefitting from non-dom tax rules didn’t amount to a crime in the eyes of the law (I wonder who made, or failed to change, the law?).

Given Jenrick’s past record in relation to the Covid regulations (even if he somehow escaped a prosecution or fine) and granting what some might think was dodgy planning consent to a Tory donor, he is justifiably leading the field after the first round of voting. It’s not exactly on the Johnsonian scale, and may owe more to the so-far apparently clean character of the competition. But if any of the other four are serious about wanting the job, they need to either come clean about any past misdeeds, or get out there and start committing some. They can hardly expect the diminishing Tory membership to vote for someone who might turn out to be a fine upstanding citizen after all. Any expectation that they can win on that basis is showing a colossal misunderstanding of the values of the party they seek to lead.