Liz Truss

Two candidates remain in the battle to succeed Boris Johnson as leader of the UK Conservative Party and Prime Minister, as betting companies adjust their ...

Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss will fight it out to become the next Prime Minister of the UK after the elimination of Penny ...

Ms Rayner said: “They’re hiding from the public and their record. Asked if had been doing so, he said in a broadcast clip: “Absolutely not. I hope to play my part in both.” It can be a divisive and difficult place. Mr Sunak’s campaign said he had secured a “clear mandate” from Tory MPs and will now “work night and day” to win the backing of the Conservative membership. Mr Sunak received 137 votes, Ms Truss 113 and Ms Mordaunt 105 with only the top two going to a ballot of party members to decide the next leader of the Conservative Party.

Conservative members to choose next UK prime minister following final MPs' vote.

Penny Mordaunt out of the race for Tory leader as Sunak wins backing of 137 MPs and Truss bags 113 votes.

Mel Stride, the Sunak campaign’s chief whip, sent a WhatsApp message around to supportive MPs on Wednesday afternoon urging them to weigh in behind him and not lend their votes elsewhere to try and influence who he would go up against. We must all now work together to unify our party and focus on the job that needs to be done.” One former Badenoch supporter said that, ahead of the final ballot, he was approached by 13 different supporters of Truss trying to get him on board. Johnson will step aside September 6. Trailing Truss by just eight votes in a knife-edge joust for second place was Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt, whose campaign enjoyed an early surge only to falter in the final stages. The evidence shows that’s Rishi.”

Penny Mordaunt knocked out in final day of voting by MPs as party members now prepare to pick PM.

He topped the MPs’ vote in every round, and always seemed likely to progress. Jonathan Gullis, one of the MPs elected in 2019, endorsed Truss on Tuesday morning. The foreign secretary’s campaign began slowly, hampered by a somewhat wooden style and mixed performances in TV debates, where Sunak more than once castigated her proposed programme of tax cuts and untested monetary interventions. The former health secretary Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zahawi, who succeeded Sunak as chancellor, were eliminated in the first round. In a statement, Mordaunt congratulated the others but called on them to end the fighting: “Politics isn’t easy. Truss, the foreign secretary, who had trailed Mordaunt throughout the previous rounds, took 113 votes, ahead of Mordaunt’s 105.

Conservative leadership candidate Rishi Sunak wants to tackle surging inflation and Britain's pandemic debts. Rival Liz Truss wants immediate tax cuts.

Ms Truss has called it "completely moral". Ms Truss has vowed to scrap the levies, but says she is committed to the 2050 target. Mr Sunak has declined to set "arbitrary targets" on military spending following the war in Ukraine. He wants Britain's defence budget to rise to 2.5% of GDP "over time". Ms Truss has been more forthright, this week committing to spending 3.0% by 2030. Ms Truss has vowed to use economic growth fuelled by her promised tax cuts as the primary way to tackle the crisis. Foreign Secretary Truss has accused Mr Sunak of pulling Britain to the brink of recession and vowed to "start cutting taxes from day one" including corporation tax paid by businesses.

State of play: Sunak (137 votes) finished first in the final vote among Conservative members of Parliament, while Truss (113 votes) leapfrogged trade minister ...

State of play: Trade minister Penny Mordaunt (92 votes) and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (86 votes) also survived. - Sunak's resignation as chancellor helped start the exodus that ultimately forced Johnson out. The last round of voting on Wednesday will trim the field down to the final two, before the party's roughly 200,000-strong membership selects the next Conservative leader and thus the U.K.'s next prime minister. Conservative members of Parliament held their penultimate vote on the party's next leader on Tuesday, with former finance minister Rishi Sunak (118 votes) finishing first and right-winger Kemi Badenoch (59 votes) eliminated. State of play: Sunak (137 votes) finished first in the final vote among Conservative members of Parliament, while Truss (113 votes) leapfrogged trade minister Penny Mordaunt (105 votes) to reach the runoff round. The race to replace Boris Johnson as U.K. prime minister and Conservative Party leader is down to two: former finance minister Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

Liz Truss, down to the final two in the race for leadership of Britain's Conservative party, is no stranger to political transformations.

“That is a disgrace,” she insisted, deadpan. Ms Truss donned military gear and perched in a tank for pictures during a visit to Estonia, echoing an image of Mrs Thatcher in a tank in West Germany in 1986. “I got no votes,” she conceded. Though the frequent comparisons with the Tory grandee are at times derided as lazy and sexist, they are comparisons that Ms Truss has clearly sought to encourage. The avid Brexiteer, never far from a clash with the European Union, campaigned to Remain, and Ms Truss joined the Conservatives after a brush with the Liberal Democrats. Born in Oxford in 1975 to parents she describes as “left-wing”, her mother, a nurse and a teacher, took a young Ms Truss to marches for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s and to “peace camp”.

Former finance minister Rishi Sunak and foreign secretary Liz Truss will battle to replace Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Truss might also struggle at the hustings against Sunak, who is more relaxed in public appearances. Whoever triumphs when the result is announced on September 5 will inherit some of the most difficult economic conditions in Britain in decades. Sunak and Truss now take their case to Conservative party members, who will decide the new leader and prime minister after a series of nationwide hustings in August. Sunak has led in all rounds of the voting among Conservative legislators but it is Truss who seems to have gained the advantage so far among the 200,000 members of the governing party who will ultimately choose the winner. Former finance minister Rishi Sunak and foreign secretary Liz Truss will battle it out to become Britain’s next prime minister after they won the final vote among Conservative Party MPs, setting up the last stage of the contest to replace former leader Boris Johnson. I will work night and day to deliver our message around the country,” Sunak posted on Twitter on Wednesday.

Analysis: in the most unpredictable leadership race in years, MPs' vote was closer than final two would have liked.

But she did have the advantage of Tuesday night’s result, which knocked out Badenoch. Truss’s team were fishing for votes in an easier pool, with her having positioned herself as the flagbearer of the right of the party. Many of those she already knows; Truss has always prioritised outreach to her parliamentary colleagues, holding surgeries in the tea rooms and hosting “fizz with Liz” (a term that has become legendary in SW1 but which her allies say she has never used). Since the race began, Truss has declined all broadcast interviews, apart from the debates, focusing on honing her message to MPs. She convinced a new generation of “red wall” MPs that she could be the standard bearer for Brexit, showing her commitment to the cause with evidence of trade deals signed and the Northern Ireland protocol bill.

LONDON — The next prime minister of Britain and leader of the Conservative Party is now guaranteed to be an ethnic minority or a woman, after Tory lawmakers ...

Was it glib? Was it fitting? Meanwhile, Johnson will be bidding a long goodbye. On Wednesday, he said farewell to the House of Commons — and to his fellow lawmakers who gave him the boot — in a rowdy appearance marking the near-end of his premiership and this weird, shape-shifting Age of Boris. Sunak is a former Goldman Sachs heavy, a former hedge fund manager. He married really rich.

The UK foreign secretary is now the hot favorite to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister.

"It was another example of the focus on messaging over substance." "I honestly think it's already over," one supportive MP said Wednesday. "She's no good at the hustings — we saw that last week — but it doesn't matter a jot. More colleagues rushed to Truss this week, he added, as it became clear she had a real shot at the top job. Both his Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries and Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg rowed in behind her campaign and were unafraid to get personal with her rivals. A YouGov poll of Tory members this week suggested that in a run-off between Truss and Sunak, it would be the foreign secretary who comes out on top. “We think that debate crystallized in people’s minds that she was someone who could really take it to Rishi," an aide said. She was then widely judged to have performed disastrously in the first of two televised leadership debates, and has continued to poll poorly among the general public over which candidate would make the best prime minister. “It's all about who has the most friends," one supportive MP explained. Truss has pledged to cancel his planned 6p rise in corporation tax, and abolish a £12 billion increase in national insurance contributions. Similarly, Truss appears to have picked up crucial votes at the 11th hour from her right-wing rival Kemi Badenoch, who was eliminated Tuesday night. Truss had been slow to launch, stuck abroad in Indonesia on ministerial duty when the Johnson regime imploded earlier this month. She now finds herself the hot favorite to win the race for No. 10 Downing Street.

The final Tory leadership pairing has caused disappointment among politicians, advisers and senior civil servants in Dublin, with one describing the ...

A senior official concerned with bilateral relations said the Truss momentum – after she was heavily backed by the right-wing press – was “ominous”. Rishi obviously hasn’t had any direct dealings with Ireland, but he seems more sympathetic.” Truss becoming prime minister “will screw up the protocol and the North, and it will ultimately screw up the United Kingdom”, he predicted.

The foreign secretary has long been seen as a favourite to succeed Mr Johnson - but she has faced criticism for running a flat campaign with shaky ...

That's the scale of the challenge we face." Ms Truss has also pledged to increase defence spending by 3% by the end of the decade, has pledged to end "Stalinist" housing targets and said she would lift a fracking ban. Although she voted Remain in the 2016 EU Referendum, Ms Truss now says she supports Brexit and has pledged to "take the vital steps necessary" to protect the Good Friday Agreement, "solve the serious problems the protocol is causing" and has vowed to "deliver on the vast opportunities" that Brexit presents. Ms Truss has argued she didn't resign over Mr Johnson's leadership while dozens of other colleagues did because she is a "loyal person" and has indicated she will not allow him to be in her cabinet if she does win the leadership race. She has argued she will bring change through her economic policy, telling the Sunday Telegraph: "What I want to achieve is the biggest change in our economic policy for 30 years. The foreign secretary has long been seen as a favourite to succeed Mr Johnson - but she has faced criticism for running a flat campaign with shaky performances in some of the debates.