New research involving multiple study groups of former Tory voters has revealed that Conservative politicians in the UK have started to be seen as “weird”, and also finds that members of the public – including Tory voters themselves – struggle to identify Tory leadership candidates.

In fairness, when you’ve got a roster/alumni of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Matt Hancock, Suella Braverman & Rishi Sunak, the weird tag is probably justified. Although it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to make a similar argument against Labour politicians, or maybe just British politicians in general.

Asked who had the best chance of winning the next election for the Tories, 70% of respondents either said they did not know or that they thought none of the candidates could win – although interestingly, James Cleverly was given the best chance, on 8%, followed by Priti Patel. Via The Guardian:

The research also found that Priti Patel, the former home secretary, was the only candidate more than half of people could correctly identify from a photo. Even among those who voted for the Tories this year, Patel, Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch were the only candidates more than half could correctly identify.

The candidate who was most liked by the group was James Cleverly, another former home secretary, thanks to his ordinary background in comparison to his Tory peers. Participants described him as “friendly, plain-speaking and approachable and [he] seemed to have a laid-back character”.

The rest were described as “smug”, “slimey”, “wooden” and just plain “weird”, which sounds about right. I mean, all you have to do is listen to the things they willingly say out loud and it’s the only real conclusion you can draw. Remember when Rishi Sunak said he had to ‘sacrifice’ Sky TV as a child, or that he thought people would like him more if they knew he ate Twix & Haribos? Or what about the countless videos of Matt Hancock being unbelievably creepy?

Or what about the #1 Tory weirdo we haven’t even mentioned yet – Jacob Rees-Mogg:

But while being ‘weird’ isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, it’s being an @rsehole that’s more detrimental to political aims. Although I guess being @rseholes worked quite well for the Tories until the election this year, in which people decided that maybe, just maybe, Labour won’t be quite as useless in charge. I don’t think Keir Starmer and co have made a particularly good start on that front, but it’s still early days, eh?