I don't know a lot about these politicians but is Theresa May the "establishment" pick for the conservatives and leadsom, who apparently is back by British Breitbart, the ukip wing of the consrvatives pick? I don't know exactly how they are viewed in Britain so can one of the U.K. Posters tell me if that's about right?
One could view May, Give and Crabb as all being establishment candidates of sorts - all three are cabinet ministers, May and Crabb both backed Remain like Cameron and Gove, in spite of being one of the main figures in the Leave campaign, is arguably the closest of the three to Cameron and his set, whom I guess you could call the Tory establishment. May is not, in fact, that close to Cameron, but seems to have emerged as his preferred successor in order to frustrate Johnson's hopes, although obviously that's rather superfluous now. However, given her levels of cabinet support and support in the wider parliamentary party it's about right to refer to her as
the establishment candidate - Gove has always been seen as a bit odd by many of his colleagues and he's certainly burnt a lot of bridges over the last few months, whilst Crabb is regarded as not being experienced enough (although undoubtedly there's a healthy dollop of social snobbery playing into his failure to attract a big following thus far, although that may not have been helped by his efforts to frame himself as the non-Eton candidate, again now rater superfluous).
Leadsom is a bit of an unknown quantity - the referendum debates were her first real exposure to the general public, but she is being backed by several Tories who've been ed over by Cameron over the years (ie Owen Paterson and Tim Loughton, although in the latter's case I wonder if there's some Warwick solidarity coming into play). Not sure if it would be fair to describe her as UKIP lite though.
