Six candidates vie to lead UK's embattled Conservative party

LONDON (AFP) — Six senior U.K. Conservatives will face off in the party leadership contest to succeed Rishi Sunak, as the deadline for candidates to enter the race passed on Monday.

Right-wing favorite Kemi Badenoch was the last to throw her hat in the ring to replace Sunak, who resigned after the party’s historic general election defeat on July 4.

James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat will also be in the running for the top job to replace Sunak, who has officially stepped down but will stay on until a successor is elected.

Party lawmakers will hold a series of votes to narrow the list down to four candidates, who will make their pitches at the Conservative Party conference at the end of September, and the politicians will then decide on a final pair.

The party’s membership will then vote for the winner, set to be announced on Nov. 2.

Now in opposition, after 14 years in power, the party will need a candidate who can unite the 121 Tory lawmakers remaining in parliament.

The nominees will have to show they can win back voters that defected to the hard-right Reform UK party in the election, raising fears among Tories that they were losing their core electoral base.

Badenoch — who served as secretary for business and trade, and minister for women and equalities in Sunak’s cabinet — announced her leadership bid in the Times newspaper.

She wrote that Tory prime ministers had allowed the country to become “increasingly liberal” and tolerated “nasty identity politics.”

Fault lines

Former Immigration Minister Jenrick will also be vying for support from the right of the party.

Once a Sunak ally, Jenrick resigned from the cabinet after saying the government’s controversial plan to send undocumented migrants to be processed in Rwanda did not “go far enough.”

Staunch right-winger Patel, who resigned as home secretary after Liz Truss fleetingly became Tory leader in 2022, launched her bid with a promise to turn the party back into a “winning machine.”

The three other candidates are slightly less to the right.

Former home secretary Cleverly said he hoped to “unite” the party with his more centrist views.

That sentiment was echoed by former work and pensions secretary Stride, a staunch Sunak ally, and by Tugendhat, an army veteran and former security minister who unsuccessfully bid to replace Boris Johnson as leader in 2022.

However, expected contender Suella Braverman, once a cheerleader for the party’s hard-right wing, said she would not be standing in the race and hit back at calls for unity.

“Many colleagues were lost at the altar of unity,” she wrote in the Telegraph newspaper, complaining she had been branded “mad, bad and dangerous” and the party did not want to hear her “truths.”

The Tory party has had five leaders since 2016, with fault lines forming following the Brexit vote, Johnson’s scandal-ridden premiership and Truss’s 44-day stint as prime minister.

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By Agence France-Presse