Pick a side What the two Tory candidates stand for - and who backs them

As the race for the Conservative leadership enters its final stage, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick are pushing back against the idea that the party faces a limited choice between two candidates of the same populist rightwing stripe.

- Peter Walker

While each won the support of only about a third of the Conservatives' 121 MPs as they reached the final vote among party members, they and their allies have repeatedly talked up their cross-party support, and the breadth of their policy focus.

So are Badenoch and Jenrick really representative of the broader Tory party - let alone the country as a whole? One way to gauge this is to examine the candidates' main inspirations, parliamentary supporters and other backers.

Team Badenoch

The ideological inspirations

It is rare for a powerful woman to emerge in politics without rumours about a supposed male svengali in the background, and with Badenoch this role is filled by Michael Gove. The pair certainly are - or were, depending who you speak to - close, and she shares a good part of Gove's move-fast-and-break-things approach to government.

Gove, now liberated from his role as an MP and editing the Spectator, did this week warn that Jenrick risks appearing like the latest in a sequence of identikit "Tory boys", while praising Badenoch's “courage”. However, Badenoch's allies dispute his influence. They are even more scornful about the Nadine Dorries-propagated idea of Gove and the former No 10 fixer Dougie Smith, who looms large in Dorries' personal mythology of the Tory party, as being effective puppet masters who are using Badenoch as a proxy.