@DGRossetti
Tories know a vote winner when they see one.
Doesn't explain Hague and Howard ...
Hague was the members choice. That and the disaster that was IDS go some way to explaining why the MPs chose Howard in 03 rather than let it go out to the wider party as they had in 97 and 01. They knew he'd be more acceptable to the wider public than whoever the party members picked, and MPs are usually less doctrinaire and more pragmatic than their parties as a whole.
Howard was the safest pair of hands available at that point. He wasn't a brilliant leader, but he also wasn't anywhere near as shit as his predecessors. The Tories made advances in vote share and seats in the 05 GE, the first time they'd managed that since 92. It's easy to forget what an absolutely irrelevant shitshow they were in opposition for the first few years of the Blair premiership. They were traumatised!
It's against this backdrop of Tory MPs historically being ruthless and pragmatic at picking the candidate who's more likely to appeal to the wider public that I think the comments about Sunak over Gove are being made. Clarke and Rifkind going on the telly in 2017 to fuck up Andrea Leadsom over May, who back then looked like the much more sensible of the two, is another example of that. As is booting Thatcher mercilessly when she became too toxic.
The way they've tended to behave over the last few decades, Tory MPs as a group, and as distinct from the party membership, would usually want the person more likely to appeal to the wider electorate. That's not Gove. He isn't winning an election. I'm not saying he won't spend any time at all as PM, but there is no way they're going to want to fight a GE with him at the helm if it can be avoided.