Tory leadership: Real jeopardy about who will be Wednesday's winners

"Every decision is difficult. Because all the easy ones are taken by other people."

So says a long-standing Conservative MP who has seen the job of prime minister up close.

They are describing the very vacancy the three aspiring successors to Boris Johnson are scrapping over.

And in seven weeks time the winner will be in Downing Street.

There has been day after day of smiles and visions, promises and hustings.

But it now boils down to a final vote of Conservative MPs here, between 1pm and 3pm this afternoon, to decide which two of the three remaining candidates get a golden ticket to the run off vote among Tory party members.

Right now, the final realignment is underway.

Votes are fluid. Even if a candidate's numbers don't appear to move much between votes, they can still have gained some and lost others.

Speaking to the various camps, let me give you a sense of what I am hearing.

Rishi Sunak has won every round so far among Conservative MPs, but is yet to cross the magic threshold of 120 votes.

120 votes is more than a third of the electorate of 358 Tory MPs, and so enough to make the run off - because the numbers wouldn't make it possible for the other two, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss, to both get more votes than him.

Team Sunak are quietly confident they should pick up enough support from former backers of the last contender eliminated, Kemi Badenoch, to get them over the line.

Enter next, Team Mordaunt. Forever second so far, in each and every round, but with Liz Truss catching her up.

Former Brexit Secretary David Davis - a leading supporter of Ms Mordaunt - is accusing Mr Sunak's operation of "dirty tricks." He has claimed on LBC radio there have "clearly been some transfers of votes" from Rishi Sunak to Liz Truss.

Team Sunak are adamant it has not happened in an orchestrated and organised way. One source told me "if there was any vote lending, it was independently arrived at".

And then there is Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

As I wrote here nearly a week ago, her team have long hoped that the "natural ceiling" of her parliamentary support is higher than Penny Mordaunt's.

Well, we are about to find out if they are right. They feel they are in a "good spot" as one aide put it to me.

It seems to me a reasonable proposition, given the gap between Kemi Badenoch and Penny Mordaunt on cultural and identity issues, that a greater proportion of Mrs Badenoch's voters may head to Liz Truss than to Penny Mordaunt.

But the gap between them as things stand is just six votes and the accompanying churn of votes with itchy feet could wipe out any advantage there, and MPs are voting for a huge range of reasons, and rarely one.

And remember too that the very nature of these multiple parliamentary rounds is about excluding people from the run off. People can - and are - voting to ensure a candidate doesn't make the final two, as well as, in so doing, endorsing someone else to make the remaining pair.

Right now, there remains real jeopardy about who will be Wednesday's winners, and who will be the final winner come the beginning of September.

An intense conversation is about to begin, lasting all summer, which will define what Conservatism means in 2022. And how we are governed in just seven weeks time.

Around 160,000 Conservative Party members will soon have the awesome responsibility, of picking the next prime minister on behalf of the rest of us.