The field of candidates hoping to be the new Conservative leader and next Prime Minister has now been whittled down to five. Suella Braverman finished last in the latest round of voting by Conservative MPs, so is eliminated from the contest.
The full result was as follows: Kemi Badenoch 49 votes, Suella Braverman 27, Penny Mordaunt 83, Rishi Sunak 101, Liz Truss 64 and Tom Tugendhat 32.
So Badenoch, Mordaunt, Sunak, Truss and Tugendhat will now go forward to a third round of voting, where again the loser will be eliminated. The process will continue until there are just two candidates remaining – Conservative members will then decide which of those two should be the new leader.
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Earlier in the day, Liz Truss sought to reinvigorate her Tory leadership bid as the contest became increasingly bitter ahead of another contender’s elimination. The Foreign Secretary is bidding to see off rival Penny Mordaunt, who is under fire from allies of Ms Truss after a surge of support for the trade minister.
Strong opinion polling also buoyed Ms Mordaunt’s campaign, pushing her into the status of bookmakers’ favourite. But supporters of Ms Truss seized on a scathing attack on Ms Mordaunt from former Brexit minister Lord Frost.
He told TalkTV: “I am quite surprised at where she is in this leadership race. She was my deputy – notionally, more than really – in the Brexit talks last year. I felt she did not master the detail that was necessary in the negotiations last year. She wouldn’t always deliver tough messages to the European Union when that was necessary.
“She wasn’t fully accountable, she wasn’t always visible. Sometimes I didn’t even know where she was. This became such a problem that, after six months, I had to ask the Prime Minister to move her on and find somebody else to support me.”
The Foreign Secretary also faced tough questions about whether her backing from Johnson loyalists could prove fatal to her ambitions to succeed him as Prime Minister. “I am a loyal person. I am loyal to Boris Johnson. I supported our Prime Minister’s aspirations and I want to deliver the promise of the 2019 manifesto,” she said on Thursday morning, to cheers from her campaign team.
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