Final two candidates for UK PM to be decided Wednesday
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Three candidates remain in the race for the leadership of the British Conservative Party after the elimination of Kemi Badenoch.
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Final two candidates for UK PM to be decided Wednesday
While former Chancellor Rishi Sunak only needs the support of one more MP to reach the 119 votes needed for the second round, the candidate who came in second place will be decided by only a handful of votes.
Trade Secretary Penny Mordaunt now has a tight 91-85 vote lead over Foreign Secretary Liz Truss in the race to become the right-wing nominee.
Of the two, Truss is closest to former prime minister Boris Johnson, and the latter's allies are promoting the minister's candidacy in right-wing British newspapers.
Sunak has promised to scrap hundreds of EU laws that impose administrative burdens on businesses, a promise that should please Conservative Party members even though in practice it is very unlikely to ever be implemented.
At the same time, polls of Conservative party members yielded starkly different results, suggesting open competition with no clear front-runners.
Sunak, however, has an advantage over his rivals in terms of funding and organizing, having set up his campaign team several months ago already.
The race intensifies
Last Friday on Channel 4 and last Sunday on ITV network, the candidates went on in televised debates to discuss cutting taxes to help ease the soaring cost-of-living crisis.
The second debate of the campaign however showed to be far more intense than the first.
From her very first interventions, Truss frontally attacked her former colleague Sunak, accusing him of having led the country into "recession" by increasing taxes when he was in charge of Finance.
“It's socialism,” Rishi Sunak fired back.
"Even (former opposition leader) Jeremy Corbyn would not have gone that far!"
Since the start of the campaign, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have been staunch rivals.
Former PM Johnson has previously expressed that Truss was the fittest candidate to succeed him, which is convinced that Rishi Sunak had been biding his time for months before stepping down on July 4, triggering the former PM Boris Johnson's downfall - which supporters of Rishi Sunak deny.
