The long-running race to replace Rishi Sunak as Tory leader is drawing to a close, with party members voting closing at 17:00 GMT today.
The winner of the race will be announced on Saturday morning, almost four months after a crushing general election defeat that led to Sunak’s resignation.
Conservative MPs are now choosing between former business secretary Kemie Badenock and former immigration secretary Robert Jenrick after four other candidates were eliminated in a series of votes.
Badenock is the favorite to win but Jenrick insists the race is “close” and says “we are fighting for every vote”.
Immigration, the economy and how the Conservatives can rebuild voters’ trust were debated at length on the campaign trail.
reunion Suffered the worst comprehensive defeat in history In July, the number of seats in the House of Commons dropped to 121, a record low, with less than 24% of the vote.
Priti Patel, Mel Stride, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly spent the summer with the final two candidates as they were nominated campaign.
Patel and Stride were eliminated in September, followed by Tugendhat and Cleverley after the party conference in Birmingham.
Cleverly was considered the best performer at the meeting and topped the vote for the third seat.
But 24 hours later, when Conservative MPs took the final vote, he was unexpectedly eliminated. Badenock received 42 votes, Jenrick received 41 votes and Cleverley received 37 votes.
A survey of Conservative Party members conducted last week by the ConservativeHome website showed Badenock leads Jenrick 55% to 31%, with 14% still undecided.
jenrick, People who resigned from Sunak’s government He has put the issue at the center of his leadership campaign in protest at his approach to immigration.
He called for a legally binding cap on net migration and for the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, which he said “makes it impossible to secure our borders”.
He also repeatedly criticized Badenock for refusing to lay out detailed policy during the campaign.
Jenrick told UK News that the Conservatives “lost 4 million voters over reforms at the last election” and it would “take a big effort” to convince them to come back.
“That’s why I said we have to fundamentally change the party, and that’s exactly what happened this time, because we didn’t address some of these big issues.
“I think just saying we’re going to look at this carefully and we’ll come up with policy over the next few months or years is not going to solve the problem.”
Badenock called for a return to the core values of the Conservative Party. He believed that the former Conservative government “speaks from the right and governs from the left.”
She supports a smaller state that would allow government to do “fewer things” but do them better.
She dismissed Jenrick’s criticism of her, saying the party needed to decide where it stood first.
She told UK News: “We need to get back to first principles. We end up talking about policy without rooting it in principle.
Badenock also condemned the budget as destroying jobs and lowering wages.
She described the government as “Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party, led by Keir Starmer”.
