What will be the main issues facing the future leader of the Conservative Party?

Either Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch will be declared the new leader of the Conservative Party on Saturday morning, ending the four-month contest.

The winner will be at the helm as the party tries to recover from July’s general election result, but what will be the immediate issues facing the Tories?

Whoever will be declared leader on Saturday will be the party’s fourth leader since the summer of 2022.

Tory MPs have had public disagreements and spats in recent years on topics from immigration to integrity, and one Tory MP said bringing the party together was the next leader’s number one task.

Conservative peer and election commentator Lord Robert Hayward told the AP news agency that “the biggest challenge is to get the party to stop arguing with each other”.

“It’s easy to say we’re moving towards unity, but I’m afraid that over the last eight years … public discord has become endemic to large sections of the parliamentary party,” he explained.

However, while he says it could be a “difficult” job, Lord Hayward believes “one big asset” the new leader has when it comes to this is that he is Labor in government.

He explained: “The Labor government is now getting all the attention and is facing all sorts of difficulties.”

He added: “The opposition – although much diminished – has something to shoot at, which is a lot easier than shooting at each other.”

The issue of immigration and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is one that could bring party unity back to center stage and was a hotly debated topic during the campaign.

Mr Jenrick is a former immigration minister and left Rishi Sunak’s government last year amid a disagreement over the plan for Rwanda. He called for the ECtHR to leave and said the party should “get serious” about migration.

Ms Badenoch said the focus on the ECtHR risked shutting down “the conversation we need to have with the whole country” about immigration and stopped short of saying she would scrap the deal altogether, writing in The Daily Telegraph in September that “if is necessary’ the UK should leave ‘international frameworks such as the ECHR’.

Adam Drummond, head of political and social research at the Opinium poll, said that whoever wins, “it’s hard to see them not talking a lot about immigration”.

He told the PA news agency that the issue had “dropped” in the priorities of people planning to vote Conservative or Reform in Britain, but that talking about it risked discussing the “prominence” of a key issue for reform.

“As I said, I don’t think they will be able to risk the temptation to do that, but I don’t think they should,” Mr Drummond said.

Focusing on the economy could offer the Conservatives a “viable” route back to power, Mr Drummond suggested.

“Their temptation will be to focus a lot on immigration, but really they should be talking about the economy,” he said.

Both candidates responded to Rachel Reeves’ first budget on Wednesday. Mr Jenrick said the public was being ‘trolled’ by the government, posting on X. ‘They have increased the cost of capital. But they say they want investment.

“They have increased the cost of hiring workers, but they say they want more jobs.

“They said they wanted value for money, but they appointed the head of HS2 to run the new value for money office.”

Meanwhile, Ms Badenoch told LBC that “this is not a growth budget”.

“Labour has no plan, they just want to blame the Tories,” she told the radio station.

Mr Drummond said that “given the economic situation”, there could be a situation where “things come to a standstill for Labour” and the Conservatives could have a “viable” path back to power.

“But they should probably focus on … trying to win the economic argument and be seen as viable economic stewards,” rather than trying to oust voters they lost to the right to Reform Great Britain.”

The Conservatives secured 121 seats in July’s general election, losing constituencies to Labour, the Liberal Democrats and UK Reform in various parts of the country.

Labor won almost 300 more seats than the Conservatives with 33% of the vote compared to the Conservatives’ 23%.

As well as bringing the party back together in Parliament, Lord Hayward said that under the new leader the party needed to “send a message to the wider public” about their position as Labour’s main opposition.

“They have left-wing voters, people who went to the Lib Dems and took a large number of seats from the Tories, and they have right-wing voters and all the abstainers.

“They need to find a message that basically says, ‘we are the coherent opposition’.”

“It’s not going to happen right away, but it’s a question of whether they can do it in months.”

He said MPs should “in particular” work during that time to “show that they are a cohesive group”.

Despite losing seats and votes in the general election, Mr Drummond said he believed warnings about the potential size of Labour’s majority were working well for the Conservatives.

“One of the, I think, successful things the Conservatives did in the election was to say ‘don’t give Labor a supermajority.’

He added: “It has focused attention on the size of a possible Labor victory rather than the question of who you want to be in power.”