Who are the UK Conservative Party leadership candidates and what have they said about the Middle East?

Earlier this week, Conservative MPs held the first of six rounds of voting to appoint the next leader of the party following former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s resignation in the wake of the massive general election defeat in July.

Five former cabinet ministers have entered the race, including former Foreign Secretary James Cleverley, who was in office at the start of the Israel-Gaza war, and former business secretary Kemi Badenoch.

The next leader of the right-wing party will be announced on 2 November after Conservative Party members vote on the final two candidates.

The winner will lead just 121 Conservative MPs in opposition to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's Labour Party, which has 411 seats in parliament, over the next five years.

So who are the five MPs in the running and what is their history on the Middle East?

Robert Jenrick

MP Robert Jenrick is currently positioned as a frontrunner after winning the first voting round on Tuesday.

Jenrick is a hardline Tory who advocates for the controversial scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda and has said that the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights – which was one of the main legal barriers to the scheme.

The former Secretary of State of Housing and Communities was recently accused of Islamophobia after saying that police should have "immediately arrested" people saying "Allahu Akbar" on Britain’s streets in the wake of the far-right anti-Muslim riots last month.

As immigration minister, he reportedly intervened to ask the Home Office whether it would be possible to revoke the student visa of Palestinian Dana Abu Qamar in October after she gave an interview to Sky News in the wake of the Gaza war.

Kemi Badenoch

Kemi Badenoch is the only woman running and has been leading the polls as the bookies' favourite to win.

The shadow communities secretary, who is of Nigerian origin, is regarded as the strongest competition to Jenrick after she came in second in the vote on Tuesday. Badenoch named her campaign 'Renewal 2030' and warned that the party "can't just sit around pointing out how terrible Labour are".

Announcing her candidacy, she pledged to probe "what it means to be a Conservative" and said the election defeat reflected the confused identity of the party over the past decade.

Badenoch claimed this week that the Labour government’s decision to halt some arms export licenses to Israel following legal advice was a "political decision".

She was also condemned for saying that five pro-Gaza MPs, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who formed a new bloc in parliament this week, were elected "on the back of sectarian Islamist politics".

She said that the MPs held "alien ideas that have no place here" and espoused "the sort of politics that we need to defeat and defeat quickly".

James Cleverly

Former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly was a stalwart of Boris Johnson’s premiership and has had growing endorsements from current and former party figures.

He is the only candidate with senior cabinet experience in two of London's 'offices of state' as foreign secretary and home secretary during the Johnson and Sunak premierships. He is running on textbook Conservative policies of higher spending on defence and lower taxes with a 'smaller state' approach.

Cleverly was foreign secretary when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza and promoted what he called Israel's "right to defend itself" as the Israeli government cut off water, fuel and food supplies into Gaza during the first ten days of the invasion.

Tom Tugendhat

A former reserves military officer Tom Tugendhat has been an MP since 2015 following over a decade in the army, serving in the US coalition in Iraq and the Afghanistan War in the 2000s.

At his campaign launch this week, he pledged to make the Conservatives "a serious force again" saying that voters no longer take the party seriously.

While his support among other MPs is lower than the bigger names of Badenoch or Jenrick, his defence background will be attractive to the party and its traditional membership – who vote in the final round.

He ran as leader in 2022 following the resignation of then prime minister Boris Johnson but failed to gain enough votes in the contest, which saw Liz Truss chosen.

A member of the party’s centrist ‘One Nation’ bloc, Tugendhat has held roles in defence, security and foreign affairs and is known for particular interest in the Middle East. He reportedly worked as a journalist in Beirut in the 1990s after reading Islamic Studies at Cambridge, according to an article in The Observer newspaper.

In keeping with the Conservative line, he backs Israel and once criticised the UN Security Council for condemning Israel’s settlement policy in the occupied West Bank. In a 2017 article in the right-wing magazine The Spectator, the MP wrote that: "The Arab Spring showed that the Israel-Palestinian conflict doesn't matter."

Mel Stride

Mel Stride has appeared as a surprise contender to take the reins from Sunak and is running on an agenda closest to the former prime minister’s policies.

As a low-key member of Sunak's cabinet, he is considered a "safe pair of hands" and has pitched himself as a unity candidate with respect across the party.

In an interview with The Observer last month, he warned against the party shifting to "populist politics" in response to frustrations over the success of Nigel Farage’s right-wing anti-migration Reform UK party in the July election.

The upstart rightwing party was seen to have won over votes from traditional Tory voters.

The 62-year-old MP is currently the shadow work and pensions secretary and has been in parliament since 2010.