It highlights the challenge Tugendhat faces: as the clear front-runner among the One Nation candidates in the contest, he should have a fairly clear path to the final two. But the traditional role of his faction in the final round is losing.

Thus, he needs to find ways to offer Conservative members what they want without either coming across as insincere or alienating the MPs who have flocked to his standard since Penny Mordaunt lost her seat.

Tugendhat clearly recognises that this is a vulnerability; his initial op-ed in the Telegraph hinged on the dubious claim that the leadership contest was not about policy, because Tories all agree on the important policies. Yesterday’s law-and-order pitch was much stronger, but the question is, how many other policy areas like it can he find?

On the other side of the party, in the parallel race for the Right-wing slot in the final round, Robert Jenrick is the one to watch. He has by far the best-prepared and slickest campaign, with the only big launch event and a flurry of media hits, and aside from a few public missteps has handled the early weeks well.

Kemi Badenoch who is still in the lead, for now: in our latest ConservativeHome survey she picked up seven points and took a full third of members’ first preferences. She has a strong start, having led our Cabinet League Table for months; it helps having held a brief that allowed her to make strong interventions on cultural issues whilst avoiding responsibility for things like tax and immigration.

But it’s tough out in front, and the Shadow Housing Secretary has come in for attack like no other candidate. There were Civil Service leaks from her time in office, a barrage from Sir John Hayes about her allegedly low-profile response to the riots, and most recently The Sun dug up a video of her boasting in the House of Commons about defeating migrant caps.

For all that, she’s still in the lead, and it would be grossly premature to write her off. Three months is also a very long campaign, with plenty of time for her rivals to fall at a fence. Yet unless things ease up, we’ll need to see much more energy (and dare one say it, aggression) from her campaign than we have seen to date if she wants to maintain her lead.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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