They, they didn’t stop at The Prittster after all. If anyone was Boris Johnson’s continuity candidate, it was Priti Patel, and she’s been eliminated from the Tory leadership race after winning just 14 votes in the first ballot of MPs.

The party is still coming to terms with the confusing legacy of the Johnson years. After the trauma of Johnson’s forced departure from No 10, which left deep resentment against Rishi Sunak in party members, the wider disaster of the election defeat has led to a rethinking of Johnson’s immigration policy.

The most significant thing about the first ballot result is that it confirmed Robert Jenrick as the frontrunner. Excited talk among some of his MP supporters about him winning half the votes of Tory MPs at the first time of asking proved to be far from the truth, but with 28 votes he was six ahead of Kemi Badenoch, who had started as favourite.

Jenrick’s lead confirms the importance of immigration as an issue in this election. He has set out the clearest anti-immigration policies, including rejecting the European Court of Human Rights, and has the credibility of having resigned from the last Tory government over the issue.

And if immigration is the issue means that the data from the Johnson years must be buried.

After all, it was Johnson who was primarily responsible for the post-Brexit border policy that saw net immigration rise to 700,000 by 2022. However grateful MPs and party members may be to Johnson for delivering Brexit, and however angry they may be about the manner in which he was removed from office, they are now looking for someone to win the issue back from Nigel Farage – a task Jenrick has undertaken with some rigour.

So Patel is gone. Her record as Home Secretary wasn’t enough to save her. She may have been responsible for the Rwanda deportation plan, but she was Johnson’s Home Secretary, co-chairing the expansion of legal immigration. She had used her time out of office to work hard to win over some surprise “One Nation” Tory MPs on the left of the party, but most of those who supported her lost their seats.

And the second most significant thing about the first ballot was that Kemi Badenoch, in second place, was only one vote ahead of James Cleverly. Terms like left and right can often be unhelpful, but they still mean something in the parliamentary Conservative Party. If Jenrick and Badenoch are the right-wing candidates, then the “left” could unite behind Cleverly and put him in the top two, squeezing Badenoch out.

On the other hand, as Jenrick increasingly becomes the favourite, Conservative MPs who have doubts about him will increasingly wonder which candidate is most likely to stop him.

Given Badenoch’s former status as a Tory grassroots darling, that may give her the chance to turn things around. The risk for the left in giving party members a choice between Jenrick and Cleverly is that Cleverly, another former Home Secretary, will become too closely associated with the failings of the Home Office itself.

We could be heading for another neck-and-neck race to decide the final two. Remember, Liz Truss overtook Penny Mordaunt on the last lap to secure her place alongside Sunak in the membership vote two years ago.

What is striking is the receding tide of Johnsonism. We may find out how much star power the former prime minister still has when his memoirs, Unleashedwill be published next month. His endorsement could still carry weight if he expresses a preference between the latter two – but it will be far less than he had hoped a few months ago.