First round of voting for new PM among UK Conservative

• MPs to vote on who will succeed Boris Johnson on September 5.
• Johnson resigned last week after a cabinet revolt, led by then-finance minister Rishi Sunak.
• Sunak topped Tory MPs’ nominations on Tuesday, ahead of Liz Truss, Paul Shapps and Penny Mordaunt.

LONDON: Britain’s ruling Conservative Party was set to narrow down the eight contenders competing to succeed Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday, despite mounting scepticism over alleged dirty practises.

Johnson was to face one of his last sessions of Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons before his successor is revealed on September 5.

Labour wanted to force a vote of no confidence in Johnson’s leadership, saying that the UK can’t afford more Tory fighting because of the cost-of-living crisis and the war in Ukraine.

Constitutional scholars called the government’s move extraordinary.

Johnson resigned last week after a cabinet revolt, led by then-finance minister Rishi Sunak, over a string of scandals that hurt the Conservatives in the polls.

A politician who won a landslide election in December 2019 and pushed the UK out of the EU a month later fell from grace before the Covid epidemic.

Conservative MPs were to vote Wednesday on the eight candidates who survived a Tuesday cull.

They are eliminated if they don’t obtain 30 votes. Next week’s voting will narrow the field to two.

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Then grassroots party members vote.

Johnson insists he will stay above the battle, but his surviving adherents have trashed frontrunner Sunak and are backing right-wing foreign secretary Liz Truss.

Sunak’s camp denied that there was a plan to put less popular candidates in the final runoff vote against Truss.

Shapps, who withdrew to support Sunak, disputed suggestions that his candidate was a “socialist chancellor” for managing a major pandemic aid package.

Sunak has talked a lot about the need to balance the books. This is in contrast to his opponents, who have been promising tax cuts, which have worried the Bank of England and other economists.

Sunak topped Tory MPs’ nominations on Tuesday, ahead of Mordaunt, Truss, and Tugendhat.

Kemi Badenoch, Nadhim Zahawi, Jeremy Hunt, and Suella Braverman rounded out the eight.

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