The likely cause of Cleverly's surprise departure is more nonsense than conspiracy Conservative leadership

Whenever something unexpected happens in politics, two questions immediately arise: How the hell did it happen and what does it mean? Given the recent turn in the Conservative leadership race, at least the first question offers no obvious answers.

James Cleverly would have gone to bed on Tuesday night with overwhelming confidence that he would make it to the final two rounds of the competition. He had led the third round of voting for Tory MPs, had clear momentum and was the bookmakers' favourite.

Those certainties shattered at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday when the results of the fourth and final round of parliamentary voting were read out to the assembled journalists and MPs: Cleverly had somehow lost two votes and was out of the race. Tory members will elect Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick instead.

This was a sudden and unexpected turn of fate. Cleverly, widely seen as the star of last week's Tory conference, had on Tuesday missed just one of the 40 supporters in the House of Representatives needed to secure advancement in a three-horse race involving 120 voters. He definitely had momentum. Jenrick, the previous favorite, should go.

The immediate suspicion was that something nefarious was afoot – either other camps were lending votes to Cleverly on Tuesday to increase his support, or Cleverly's camp was trying to increase Jenrick's support to ensure the shadow home secretary faced him and not the more prominent and charismatic Badenoch in the membership vote.

Rather than a conspiracy-based attempt to influence the contest, however, what seems more likely is a blunder: a number of individual lawmakers trying to vote in a way that they think might help their candidate , with unintended consequences.

Yes, some MPs will simply have changed their mind when faced with a different choice. But others might have tried to influence the outcome in a certain way.

For example, it was expected that most of Tom Stimmehat's 20 supporters would switch to his centrist colleague Cleverly after he dropped out of the race on Tuesday. But a Tugendhat supporter told reporters they would choose Badenoch instead to eliminate Jenrick because they disliked his policies so much.

That was just one MP. But if your entire data set includes 120 people – there are 121 Tory MPs, but Rishi Sunak, the outgoing party leader, did not take part – then only a relatively small change was needed to have a significant effect.

This is, of course, a variation on the oldest and most important lesson in politics: learning to count. The other lesson, at least for some Tory MPs, may be that they are not the strategic masters of 4D chess that they like to think they are.

This brings us to the second question: What does that mean? The most obvious answer to this is that Conservative members have a relatively narrow choice, namely between two candidates who are heavily on the populist right in the party.

Yes, there are notable differences in both policy and approach. Jenrick will present himself as a candidate with a plan based largely on reducing migration, particularly an immediate withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, but also focusing on the NHS and the economy.

Badenoch's policy palette is less overtly doctrinaire, and she will place great emphasis on her background as an engineer and her desire to find solutions to the UK's ills. However, she is a keen and vocal fighter for culture and enjoys arguing with opponents, sometimes over fairly trivial topics.

While it can be a difficult matter to assess the size of Tory members, let alone their views, it is believed that they tend to lean further to the right than the party's MPs and so are unlikely to object too much to one will have choice.

What may be more problematic and significant is the fact that Tory voters are a much broader church and many of them have already fled a party that they see as excessively aligned with Reform UK under Boris Johnson's leadership.

Both Jenrick and Badenoch are likely to pursue former Tories who supported Nigel Farage's party in the election, which could open up more space for Labor and the Liberal Democrats in particular.

“Christmas has come early in the blue wall,” said one LibDem official, referring to the commuter belt seats where the party dumped dozens of Conservative MPs in July. The official party account responded to the news by tweeting a short video clip showing a yellow LibDem tractor crashing through a wall of blue hay bales.

Will such triumphalism, much like Cleverly's confidence, prove misplaced? Only time will tell. One thing is certain, however: Even in opposition, the Conservatives have not lost their ability to surprise.