EXTRA TIME

Important Day at Westminster

• Boris Johnson will face Keir Starmer in his last PMQs as prime minister at 12:00 – before Tory MPs decide which two candidates will compete to replace him.
• Leadership candidates Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss face a final vote by Conservative MPs at 13:00 -15:00. The result is expected at 16:00
• Kemi Badenoch was knocked out of the contest on Tuesday afternoon and the 59 MPs that back her must now choose which of the final three to support
• Former chancellor Sunak was top in Tuesday’s ballot with 118 votes, while Mordaunt came second and Truss third.
• Rishi Sunak is widely expected to advance to the members’ ballot, but questions remain about whether will be joined by Liz Truss or Penny Mordaunt.
• The two winning candidates today will face a ballot of 160,000 Tory Party members, with the result due to be announced on 5 September
• Columnist Allison Pearson fears in The Telegraph that the final two would be Sunak vs Truss. “Vote for billionaire Rishi Sunak or painfully wooden Liz Truss, and you‘ll kill the party you love,” she writes and urges the MPs to vote for Penny Mordaunt, the third remaining candidate:
• “Tory MPs might think, for perfectly honourable reasons, that either of the two other, more experienced candidates would be a ‘safe’ bet. Quite the opposite is true, it seems to me,” says Allison Pearson. “In fact, my fear is that if either Rishi or Liz becomes Prime Minister then obliteration for our party at the general election in 2024 is practically guaranteed.”
• On the other hand, Penny Mordaunt is criticised for not being ready for office “on day one”. Lord Frost’s cutting critique of Penny Mordaunt suggests that she would not be the right person for the job of Prime Minister, but others claim that only she could win the next election for the Tories, and unite the UK in these difficult times.

July 20, 2022 at 12:24 pm 2 comments