Brexiteer Braverman Eliminated From Race, Five Through to UK Leader TV Debate

Five candidates now remain in the race to replace Boris Johnson as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after Brexiteer Suella Braverman was eliminated as the candidate with the fewest vote in Thursday’s poll of Conservative Parliamentarians.

The chairman of the Conservative Party’s internal ‘1922’ committee which organises leadership challenges again entered a packed room at Parliament today to announce the results of the second round of voting which saw the lowest-placed candidate eliminated. Brexiteer Suella Braverman lost five votes compared to the last round and placed last and therefore became the third candidate to be knocked out of the race since nominations closed Monday afternoon.

Badenoch — 49 votes (+7)
Braverman — 27 votes (-5)
Mordaunt — 83 votes (+16)
Sunak — 101 votes (+13)
Truss — 64 votes (+14)
Tugendhat — 32 votes (-5)
356 votes cast out of 358 eligible

The succession of ballots will now rest over the weekend, with action now focussing on televised leader’s debates due to take place on Friday evening and Sunday. While it is conceivable that a low-placed candidate like Tom Tugendhat, the next lowest vote-scored in this round, could now drop out it is probably more likely he would hope to turn his fortunes around by attempting to perform strongly in the public debates and claw back support.

After the TV debates, there will be more ballots of the 358 Conservative Members of Parliament who are eligible to vote at this stage next week. Once the field has been whittled down to two candidates, they will then take place in a postal ballot of all Conservative Party members in the country — about 180,000 people — to determine the winner.

As the Conservative Party is the largest group in the UK parliament, whoever becomes Party leader next will by default become Britain’s next Prime Minister.

For Brexit leader Nigel Farage, that the Conservative Party moved so quickly to eliminate what he called the only proper Brexiteer on the ballot was illustrative. Attorney General Braverman was the only candidate who said they wanted to take Britain out of the European Court of Human Rights, one of the considerable parts of the Brexit process that are still to be done. Indeed, some individuals — even nominal Brexiteers — say because the ECHR isn’t part of the European Union, but rather the closely-linked Council of Europe, Britain shouldn’t leave it at all.

Farage wrote shortly after the news of Braverman’s departure from the race: “The Tory party will do everything it can to stop the only candidate who wants to leave the ECHR.”

Where the votes of Braverman’s supporters goes now could very well decide the direction of the race. Observers have pointed to the closeness, in some regards, of the positions of candidates Braverman, Badenoch, and Truss. There have even been calls for Badenoch and Braverman, who have less experience in top government departments, to back out of the race and lend their support to Truss.

But that Braverman’s supporters will now flock to Truss, which would move her up to second place, is far from clear. Braverman was the Brexiteer’s Brexiteer in this race, and while she claims to have latterly come to faith int he idea of Britain being better off without the European Union, Liz Truss is a former Liberal Democrat, and a former remainer.

Braverman and Badenoch are also clearly close, having been photographed embracing outside Parliament with colleague Steve Baker citing “enduring friendship” through the race.

Who is standing to become the next Conservative leader and British Prime Minister, and what do they stand for?

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.

At her campaign launch 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.

She has also come out as an opponent of the Boris Johnson government-era Online Safety Bill. Reacting to it being delayed until after the leadership competition was concluded, Badenoch said the proposals were in “no fit state to become law”, adding “We should not be legislating for hurt feelings.”

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.”

Some conservatives have expressed concern about her pro-freedom credentials as well, pointing to the fact she voted in favour of vaccine passports while a member of the government during the coronavirus lockdowns. While she was bound by her job to vote with the government on the matter, she could have possibly abstained or resigned over the matter in theory.

Some have defended Badenoch for her performance then: former Downing Street functionary Nikki da Costa has claimed that behind closed doors, “was one of few objecting to vaccine passports” inside government.

 

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.

Mordaunt has so far polled well, but several question marks hang over her views on key cultural matters. Her campaign launch was dogged by her sidestepping questions on whether she knows what a woman is. She has previously in government service claimed that “transmen are men” and transwomen are women”.

While she is a Brexiteer and has worked in the Brexit department, her former boss Lord Frost cast doubt on her performance in the role on Thursday, saying on British television that: “To be honest, I’m quite surprised she is where she is in this race… she did not master the necessary detail in the negotiations last year. She wouldn’t always deliver tough messages to the European Union when that was necessary and I’m afraid she wasn’t fully accountable or always visible. Sometimes I didn’t even know where she was.”

As a relative unknown, some have turned to Mordaunt’s recently published book on politics to get a grasp on her views, Greater: Britain After the Storm (2020). Critics have pointed to the fact it was praised by Tony Blair, and its foreword was written by Bill Gates, as sources of concern. In terms of its content, Conservative commentator Toby Young called the book a “Great pitch for the leadership… of the Labour Party.”

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.

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 both 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.