On 1 June, Kenneth Clarke was announced as one of Stewart's MP backers, with other supporters including David Lidington, David Gauke, Nicholas Soames, Tobias Ellwood, Gillian Keegan and Victoria Prentis. Against expectations, on 13 June he made it through the first parliamentary ballot, gaining 19 votes, two more than the elimination threshold. On 16 June, he appeared, as one of the six remaining candidates, in a televised debate on Channel 4. He was widely judged to have won the debate, with Michael Deacon writing in "The Daily Telegraph" that "If you were to judge it by the response of the studio audience, Channel 4's debate had only one winner. Rory Stewart got more rounds of applause than any other candidate – and, at the end, when each took turns to sum up, he was the only candidate to get a round of applause at all".