Here's Who Actually Chooses the Next U.K. Prime Minister

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.

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