Nominations for Conservative Party members who plan to stand in the leadership election to replace Liz Truss as Conservative leader and UK prime minister officially opened on Thursday night, with a high limit of 100 MPs set for the final shortlist. Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Backbench Committee, which is in charge of the Conservative election, said potential candidates were expected to submit their nominations by 2pm local time on Monday to narrow down the final two contestants.
If there is no parliamentary agreement on a single candidate, the final two will be put to an accelerated online vote before the wider Tory party membership, which will be closed by October 28. “That [100 MPs] should be achievable by any serious candidate who has a realistic prospect of passing,” Brady said, confirming the likelihood of three possible candidates emerging, given the 357 Tory MPs in the House of Commons.
“It is up to the deputies whether we will have one or two candidates. If there are two candidates who are acting in the national interest, our members can have their say,” said Conservative party chairman Jake Berry, who will oversee the online membership vote. If only one candidate appears with the necessary support by Monday’s deadline of 2:00 p.m., the party will have a new leader that day. If there is a clash between the two final contenders, the leader will be in place next Friday.
Rishi Sunak, British India’s former chancellor, won the support of 137 MPs in the last round of Tory parliamentary voting in July and was the clear front-runner among his peers. However, runner-up Liz Truss, with 113 votes, became the favorite when the poll opened to the estimated 170,000 Tory members who voted in online and postal ballots between July and early September.
Many of Sunak’s party loyalists hope she will emerge as the front-runner to replace Truss after she resigned on Thursday at the end of a disastrous 44-day tenure at 10 Downing Street – the shortest of any British prime minister in history. But the ruling party remains deeply divided, with supporters of former prime minister Boris Johnson still seeing Sunak as having betrayed his Partygate scandal-hit former boss by resigning from the cabinet and speeding up his exit from Downing Street in early July.
If Sunak does throw his hat in the ring and garner the support of enough of his party colleagues, it would mark one of the most remarkable comebacks in British politics for a British politician of Indian origin. The 42-year-old former finance minister, the son-in-law of Infosys co-founder Narayan Murthy, has been widely praised in recent weeks as many of his warnings about Truss’ “fairy tale” economic program of tax cuts have come to pass.
“I will remain a Member of Parliament… It has been a great honor to represent my constituents in Richmond, North Yorkshire as their Member of Parliament and I will be happy to continue doing so for as long as they have me.” ‘ he said at the end of last month’s Tory leadership battle, which he lost by a much narrower margin than expected – Sunak won 43 per cent of his party’s vote compared to Truss’ 57 per cent.
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