Conservative Leadership Contest to Replace Boris Johnson Sees Eight Candidates Make The Cut

The contest to replace Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party and therefore as the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom officially began on Tuesday evening with the nominations process seeing eight prospective candidates receive the requisite support from fellow MPs to qualify for the contest.

Following a day full of jockeying and positioning from top Tories and pitches from the various candidates, eight remain, including former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, international trade minister Penny Mordaunt, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, former Education Secretary Nadhim Zawahi, Attorney General Suella Braverman, and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Tugendhat, with all receiving at least the support from at least twenty other Members of Parliament.

Ousted from contention are former Health Secretary Sajid Javid and Tory MP Rehman Chishti, with Home Secretary Priti Patel and Transport Secretary Grant Shapps both withdrawing from contention earlier in the day. The remaining candidates will now face off in a series of votes among MPs starting on Wednesday.

Despite his record of a massive spending spree during the Chinese coronavirus crisis by paying people not to work, ushering in the highest tax burden in seven decades, and being personally fined for violating the government’s own convoluted and draconian lockdown rules alongside Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak has so far received the most support from the establishment wing of the Tory Party, with big wigs such as Dominic Raab, Grant Shapps and disgraced former Health Secretary Matt Hancock all throwing their support behind Johnson’s Brutus.

Sunak, one of the wealthiest men in the Parliament after marrying into the Indian industry aristocracy and himself a former Goldman Sachs banker, played turncoat on Prime Minsiter Boris Johnson alongside former Health Secretary Sajid Javid, with both cabinent members announcing their resignations within minutes of eachother last week. The high-profile rebelions sparked a wave of resignations from the government, ultimately forcing Johnson to announce his resignation.

Present polling suggests Rishi Sunak could have an edge over the other candidates when it comes down to beating Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer at election time, which is of course one of the key qualities in a leader. Yet, polling in the United Kingdom is one of the imprecise political dark arts and is certainly known for wildly missing the mark [Brexit citation here] and a lot of that lead may come down to simply being the only candidate most people have heard of at the moment. Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch, while apparently popular with Conservative party members, are hardly household names in the wider country as of now.

Yet, if a new leader decides to keep going until the late-2024 planned date for the next General Election — a risk itself, but a calculated one they may choose — that is plenty of time as Prime Minister to get that name recognition.

On Monday, both Badenoch and Mordaunt nearly tied for first among preferences in a survey conducted by the Conservative Home website. While the two have both received support from the more conservative elements of the political right in Britain, Mordaunt has received push back for her insistence that “transmen are men” and transwomen are women”. Badenoch, conversely, was reported to have papered over gender neutral toilets with signs for “men” and “ladies” at the site of her campaign launch, according to the BBC.

During her announcement, Badenoch stressed the importance of limited government, saying: “We can only deliver lower taxes if we stop pretending that the state can continue to do everything we are currently trying to do.

“We need to recognise it is not a matter of doing the same with less, we need to focus on the essentials, we need to be straight with people. The idea we can simply say ‘efficiency savings’ and click our heels three times and they will materialise is simply for the birds.

“It is the scale and structure of government that drives the inefficiencies. My government will discard the priorities of Twitter and focus on the people’s priorities.”

While Sunak has amassed significant support among the party elites, he has left himself open to attack, over fears that he would continue with the high tax regime, continue with the Green agenda, with Sunak previously speaking at the World Economic Forum to promote the idea of the Great Reset with a “whole-of-economy transition” towards so-called green energy sources, and potentially being weak in dealing with the European Union on Brexit.

Thus, two key allies of Boris Johnson, Brexit Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and Culture Secretary Nadine Dories summoned cameras to Downing Street on Tuesday afternoon to announce that they would be putting their weight behind Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, whom they described as the “stop Rishi” candidate and as being “pro-Brexit” despite Truss, a former Liberal Democrat, voting against leaving the European Union in the 2016 Referendum.

Attorney General and Johnson loyalist Suella Braverman also made the cut on the back of her promise to end the green push to make Britain carbon-neutral by the year 2050. Braverman has also taken the hardline Brexit position of vowing to remove the UK from the European Court of Human Rights, which controversially blocked a deportation flight of illegal migrants from Britain to Rwanda last month.

“A government I lead will safeguard Brexit, take on the Blairite liberal consensus and get this country back on track,” Braverman promised.

The contest will be rounded out by two Remainer politicians, former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Tugendhat. Playing up his service in the military — serving in both the Iraq and Afhanistan wars — Tugendhat said in his candidacy launch on Tuesday that the country must not “retreat” from the challenges it faces.

“We have retreated into the pettiness of a politics that is more about personality than principle,” he said. “We have retreated into division when we desperately need unity. When the moment demanded service, we delivered scandal. I cannot accept retreat”.

Though he voted in the 2016 EU Referendum against Brexit, Tugendhat laid out a 10-year economic plan to make the most of the oppourtuninites of the UK’s independence.

Here are the candidates vying to become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom:

Kemi Badenoch

Former equalities minister Kemi Badenoch was born to Nigerian parents in London before growing up mostly in Lagos and finally returning to the UK at age 16. She worked as a Mcdonald’s employee while pursuing her education, graduating with a degree in engineering. A follower of American economist Thomas Sowell, Badenoch has promised to pursue a small government strategy coupled with reduced taxes.

In her announcement speech on Tuesday, the MP for Saffron Walden said: “For too long politicians have been telling us we can have it all, that you can have your cake and eat it. And I’m here to tell you that isn’t true — it never has been. There are always tough choices in life and in politics. No free lunches, no tax cuts without limits on government spending, no stronger defence without a slimmer state.

“Governing involves tradeoffs and we have to start being honest about that. Unlike others, I’m not going to promise you things without a plan to deliver them.”

“Too many policies, like net-zero targets set up with no thought to the effect on the industries in the poorer parts of this country, the consequence is simply to displace emissions to other countries: unilateral economic disarmament, and this is why we need to change. And that’s why I’m running for leader.”

Badenoch has won praise from the base of the Conservative Party for her stance against identity politics and leftist concepts such as “white privilege” and Critical Race Theory. A 2020 speech in which she pushed back against Black Lives Matter and CRT was voted as the speech of the year by readers of the Conservative Home website.

However, her strident stance has made her a figure of ire on the left. Despite Badenoch being the only black candidate in the contest to succeed Boris Johnson, she has been branded as “enabling white supremacy” by the likes of leftist political commentator Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, who said on Friday that the Tory MP should “crawl back into her mother.”

Tom Tugendhat

Tom Tugendhat, the son High Court Judge Sir Michael Tugendhat, is perhaps the most unknown quantity running for the position, having never served in government, however, he is seen as the most hawkish and neoconservative among the candidates, taking a particularly hard-line on Russia and Communist China.

A veteran of bother the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Tugendhat argued against the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan last year, and described the exit as one of the “biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez”. He has also likened Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the Second World War, saying that there should be war crimes tribunals held along the lines of the Nuremberg Trials following the war.

Perhaps attempting to cast himself as a centrist option, Tugendhat was one of the Conservative party politicians to openly support the radical Marxist Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

Questions have also been raised surrounding his ties to the globalist elites, being one of the few British politicians to attend the secretive Bilderberg meeting in Washington DC earlier this year.

Suella Braverman

Attorney General Suella Braverman represents the hardline Brexit wing of the Conservative party, previously leading the European Research Group from 2017 to 2018.

Braverman has argued that in order to fulfil the Conservative manifesto pledge of “taking back control” of the nation’s borders, the UK must leave the European Court on Human Rights, which is technically outside of the European Union and therefore was unaffected by Brexit. The issue has become politically hot after the European court blocked a recent deportation flight of illegal migrants to Rwanda in June.

The staunch Brexiteer has also argued that remaining EU laws on the books in Britain should be phased out, saying: “Legacy EU law has to be cut back. We need to set a deadline and a test: does this EU rule support UK growth? Working groups of industry experts can draft better regulations. EU law is often written for the lowest common denominator — it’s over-prescriptive and behind the times due to ponderous Brussels processes. Its customs rules, for example, took so long to agree they’re premised on pen-and-ink forms. We can and should be more nimble than that.”

Braverman has also been a keen defender of the British empire, which she describes herself as a “child of”. Her parents, hailing from Kenya and Mauritius came to the UK UK “with an admiration and gratitude for what Britain did for Mauritius and Kenya, and India,” according to Braverman.

“The British Empire is sometimes seen very negatively, and as a source of shame. There’s a trend to start apologising, decolonising, cancelling, erasing that part of our history. And of course, there were some aspects which were bad, but on the whole, I believe the British Empire was a force for good,” she said in May.

The remaining candidates were described by Breitbart London’s Jack Montgomery in his article Send in the Clowns: Britain Faces Gallery of Fools, Flyweights, and Fake Conservatives as Next Prime Minister:

Rishi Sunak 

Hailed as a very likely future successor to the premiership shortly after Johnson’s big election win in 2019, the now-former Chancellor of the Exchequer’s star has faded considerably over recent months, and may have winked out entirely with his resignation from Cabinet alongside Health Secretary Sajid Javid having likely lent inexorable momentum to the efforts to topple Johnson.

For all the mainstream media’s focus on partygate, dodgy home decorating payments, and the decision to make the now twice-disgraced Christopher Pincher a party whip as the primary causes of Johnson’s downfall, general discontent with his premiership among the Conservative Party faithful and Brexiteers who converted to his banner in 2019 stems from the fact he has not governed like a conservative, or even a libertarian, hiking taxes to historic levels and spending public money like water on the green agenda.

Sunak, as the de facto lead finance minister, has been a large part of this, and indeed his resignation was driven in part by disagreements with Johnson over whether it not might finally be time to give people some proper tax cuts or meaningfully shield them from the cost of living crisis.

One of the richest men in Parliament due to having married into India’s billionaire business aristocracy, Sunak faces an issue of not only being able to chart a path away from the leftish tax hikes of the Johnson era — he led them and wants more of them — but also of the fact that he was also fined due to partygate, so cannot shake that particular media monkey off the government’s back either.

Sunak is also one of many allegedly conservative politicians who is bizarrely reluctant to define what a woman is.

Liz Truss

Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Secretary has had her sights set on the premiership for a long time, organising a number of glamour-style shoots with friendly press to boost her profile, her most recent venture — perhaps slightly too on the nose — seeing her perch herself on a tank in the style of Margaret Thatcher amid tensions with Russia.

She has not enjoyed the bump in popularity Defence Secretary Wallace has had from the Ukraine War due to a series of high-profile gaffes, however, including confusing the Baltic and Black Sea and endorsing Britons travelling to fight in Ukraine — a statement quickly walked back by officials and fellow Tory politicians, not least because her own departmental website warned such travel was against its advice and probably against the law.

Some Britons who did travel to Ukraine were sentenced to death by firing squad by Russian separatists in the months following her abortive endorsement.

In terms of her politics, Truss is a classic careerist chameleon, having been an ardent Remain campaigner during the EU referendum, when she was a minister in the George Osborne-led Treasury and appeared alongside him at campaign events threatening the public with ruin if they backed Brexit.

After the public voted for Brexit anyway, she staged a Damascene conversion to the cause, but voted for Theresa May’s proposed Brexit-In-Name-Only deal with Brussels every time it was put before the House of Commons.

In her younger days she was a senior activist for the Liberal Democrats, which is fanatically pro-EU and socially leftist, although it occasionally adopts vaguely conservative policies on the economy.

Jeremy Hunt

Briefly Foreign Secretary and Britain’s longest-serving Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt has been in political exile since losing the last Tory leadership contest to Boris Johnson in 2019.

While the Remainer seemed for a long time to be a David Cameron-like “sphinx without a riddle”, focused solely on gaining high office for the sake of gaining high office and utterly devoid of vision of personality, Hunt’s bitterness in his banishment has revealed a venomous authoritarian streak.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries alleged that he pushed for Britons who tested positive for Covid forcibly removed from their homes and confined in China-style isolation hotels during the pandemic.

“I said that British people would never tolerate being removed from their homes and loved ones at which point you demanded I show you the evidence for that,” Dorries recalled.

It is therefore unlikely that a Hunt Administration would bring Johnson’s lost libertarian principles into Downing Street.

Penny Mordaunt

Mordaunt, who reached the heights of Secretary of State for International Development and, very briefly, Secretary of State for Defence under Theresa May, is today a junior minister in Boris Johnson’s doomed government with a fairly low media profile — but remains a perennial fixture in articles mulling potential Tory leaders.

While a Brexiteer once well-liked among the conservative grassroots, her popularity has declined along with her media profile, aided by woke pronouncements on social issues such as her insistence that “transmen are men” and transwomen are women”.

Mordaunt has also drawn criticism for turning to arch-globalist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates to pen the forward to her 2021 book Greater: Britain After the Storm. 

Nadhim Zahawi

Zahawi, then a humble backbench MP, backed Brexit in 2016. and has since enjoyed a fairly rapid rise from backbench obscurity to somewhat prominence, particularly after being appointed Under-Secretary of State for Vaccines.

Britain’s vaccine rollout is regarded internally as a great government success, although it is likely some members of the public who have issues with Covid vaccination will view him distinctly unfavourably due to his association, of course, and his infamous broken promise that there would be no “discriminatory” vaccine passports in Britain ever cast his honesty into permanent doubt.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka