Six Tory rivals in battle to replace Sunak and revive party’s fortunes
Kemi Badenoch is the leadership favourite but Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly, Dame Priti Patel and Mel Stride hope to upset the odds.
Six senior Tories will battle it out to replace Rishi Sunak as the Conservative Party seeks to rebuild after its worst-ever general election result.
Shadow housing secretary Kemi Badenoch is the early favourite with bookmakers, while former immigration minister Robert Jenrick looks to challenge her on the Tory right.
Shadow security minister Tom Tugendhat and shadow home secretary James Cleverly look set to compete for votes from centrist Conservatives.
Former home secretary Dame Priti Patel and shadow work and pensions secretary Mel Stride complete the field of candidates who received the support of 10 MPs in order to enter the race.
MPs will vote off two of the contenders so the final four go to the party’s conference in Birmingham to make their leadership pitch.
Conservative MPs will then eliminate two more, with the final pair going to a ballot of Tory members with the winner announced on November 2.
The backbench 1922 Committee confirmed the six candidates after nominations closed on Monday afternoon.
The party faces the twin challenges of responding to the threat from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the right, as well as winning back former heartlands in southern England which shifted to the Liberal Democrats.
Ms Badenoch was the last to publicly confirm she would stand, using a Times article to blame an “incoherent” set of policies for the party’s election drubbing.
The shadow housing secretary accused successive Conservative prime ministers of allowing Britain to become “increasingly liberal” and tolerating “nasty identity politics”.
“We talked right yet governed left,” she said.
She said “renewal” was the first task for a new party leader and that she would aim to rebuild the party by 2030.
While Mr Cleverly urged an end to Tory infighting, and Dame Priti called for the party to “unite” in their leadership pitches, Ms Badenoch said there was a “bigger question of what it means to be a Conservative today”.
She wrote: “If there wasn’t, the Reform party would not exist. It is not enough to call for ‘unity to win’. We need to ask ourselves: ‘What are we uniting around? What are we winning for?’”
