Read about the latest political news, views and analysis
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One of Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss will be Britain's next prime minister. What are the contenders' answers to the big questions facing Britain? Isabel Hardman spoke to Mordaunt (00:36), Sunak (21:17) and Truss (42:15).
I’m not sure that the Conservative party wants to win elections. Tom Tugendhat was knocked out of the leadership contest on Monday, and Liz Truss is now the bookies’ favourite to be the next Prime Minister. Any party that thinks the latter beats the former cannot say it is serious. There are several reasons for Conservatives to ignore me on this topic. First, I’m not a Conservative. Second, Tugendhat and I are friends. Third, I take a view of party politics that seems to be utterly out of fashion these days. That view is that politics works better when parties try to win the other side’s votes. When Conservatives pursue Labour voters, the worst bits of right-wing conservatism are muted. When Labour woos Tory supporters, the worst bits of the left are sidelined.
11 min listen
There has been another elimination in the Tory leadership race. Break-out star Kemi Badenoch is out, with three remaining candidates left until tomorrow’s vote. Who will be the final two in the race? And are there signs of Tory MPs lending votes to manipulate the results?James Forsyth is joined by Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman.Produced by Cindy Yu and Natasha Feroze.
Kemi Badenoch has been eliminated from the Tory leadership contest. Rishi Sunak came first with 118 Tory MPs backing him; Penny Mordaunt was second on 92; Liz Truss came third on 86. Badenoch was supported by 59 MPs. Refresh this page to read the latest: 5.15 p.m. Where will Kemi's supporters go now? Now that Kemi Badenoch has been eliminated from the Tory leadership race, the big question is who will her supporters back? Leo Docherty's endorsement of Liz Truss suggests that at least some of Kemi's supporters will opt for Truss over the other leadership contenders: https://twitter.com/LeoDochertyUK/status/1549403783280607232?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw 4.20 p.m. Kemi says thanks https://twitter.com/KemiBadenoch/status/1549406569120645122?
While Britain bakes in a heatwave, politicians in Germany are worrying about the winter. The Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom has notified its European customers that it can no longer guarantee the supply of fuel due to ‘extraordinary’ circumstances. In Berlin, politicians and regulators are preparing for an ice-cold Christmas, drawing up lists for rationing priorities and emergency plans to stop the population freezing. Entertainment and frivolities will be the first things to go, while newspapers and medical production will be prioritised alongside households and hospitals. Mothballed coal power plants are being prepared for reactivation.
Netflix is promoting a new pseudo-historical blockbuster. RRR, which stands for Rise, Roar, Revolt, is an Indian film which has been playing to packed houses at home. Those expecting the usual Indian crowd-pleaser featuring magic, romance, stiff-upper-lip male heroism, and improbably gory violence will not be disappointed. RRR is set in the 1920s, when India was still in the British empire. The villains are British. No surprises there. But the portrayal of the two main British characters, ‘Governor Scott’ and his wife, is unusually nasty and at the same time amazingly silly. Among other incidents, the Scotts kidnap an Indian child and try to murder the mother. Hapless Indians are brutally tortured by assorted Brits.
The fast pace of this Tory leadership contest means that MPs are voting again in just a couple of hours. Today is the most unpredictable day of this contest so far. There are all sorts of cross-currents swirling around Westminster: some Tugendhat supporters’ primary objective is to block Truss now their candidate is out of the contest. But there are also those who aren’t fans of Penny Mordaunt – like Anne-Marie Trevelyan, who ran on Tugendhat’s ticket as his deputy, who yesterday said Mordaunt ‘left other ministers to pick up the pieces’ to plan her leadership bid. How this all balances out is hard to judge. At the same time, Kemi Badenoch is still in the race and trying to become the candidate of the right.
Oh dear. It seems that not all Tory MPs got the memo about last night's no-confidence vote. Tobias Ellwood, a longtime Johnson critic, skipped out on the vote - despite a three-line whip for all Conservatives to stay and support the government. The opposition parties ended up losing by 349 votes to 238 but Tory whips aren't happy with the Defence Select Committee chairman. Ellwood was on a trip abroad to Moldova on committee business, a decision he made despite being warned of the consequences last Wednesday, according to Tory party sources. One told Henry Zeffman of the Times: 'Other Conservative MPs cancelled foreign trips, left poorly relatives and one MP’s mother died on the morning of the vote and still attended and voted.
It’s the day of the penultimate ballot in the parliamentary stage of the Tory leadership contest. The four candidates left in the contest are Rishi Sunak, 115 votes, Penny Mordaunt, 82 votes, Liz Truss, 71 votes, and Kemi Badenoch, 58 votes. Voting to whittle the four to three begins this afternoon with the result announced at 3 p.m. But as last night’s results showed, the race is wide open. The only certainty right now is that if Badenoch is knocked out tonight, she won't be out of the spotlight for long The general consensus among MPs is that Sunak is on course to reach the final two – but when it comes to who joins him there, all bets are off.
Ah Kemi Badenoch: the Saffron Walden slayer of shibboleths who has electrified the Tory leadership race. The former equalities minister has gone from near-unknown to standard-bearer of the right during the past fortnight. She is now seeking to pull off a shock upset and overhaul Liz Truss in the MPs' ballot today. Much of Badenoch's appeal comes from her perceived ability to say home truths and communicate her views clearly and coherently. So it's all the more of a shame then that Badenoch appears to lack such candour when it comes to the thorny issue of the current government target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Sometime this century, or early in the next, women will no longer have to give birth. Already conception can take place within a test tube, and incubators have pushed back the earliest time when prematurely born infants can survive outside of the womb. We can edit genes and modify animal organs for successful implantation into human beings. We can grow meat from cell cultures, and we can clone vertebrates. For all the talk one hears about a dearth of innovation, the pace of biotechnological innovation has only accelerated since the end of the twentieth century. It will not soon stop. Artificial wombs are a feature of science fiction dating back to Huxley’s Brave New World and no doubt sometime earlier.
Only two Tory MPs will make it to the membership for a final election – which is why the number of endorsements matters. On the first round, Rishi Sunak got the support of 88 MPs, followed by Penny Mordaunt on 67, Liz Truss on 50, Kemi Badenoch on 40, Tom Tugendhat on 37 and Suella Braverman on 32. On the second round, Braverman was eliminated as Sunak came top again with 101 MPs then Mordaunt and Truss on 83 and 64 each, followed by Badenoch on 49 and Tugendhat on 32. On the third round, Tugendhat was eliminated as Sunak got 115 votes, followed by Mordaunt on 82, Truss on 71 and Badenoch on 58. Then on the fourth round, Badenoch was eliminated as Sunak got 118, then Mordaunt on 92 and Truss 86.
Kemi Badenoch has one last chance. With Tom Tugendhat out on Monday evening, the MP for Saffron Walden is now bringing up the rear in the contest to replace Boris Johnson. With 58 votes from MPs, Badenoch is still substantially behind the third-placed Liz Truss on 71, with Penny Mordaunt coming second on 82 and Rishi Sunak far in the lead on 115. This would seem to confirm that Tory MPs want to offer their members a choice between A New Boris (Sunak) and either The Maybot Strikes Back (Mordaunt) or Return of the Maggie (Truss). Sunak and Mordaunt are continuity candidates and a victory for either would signal that the Tories have not changed and, in fact, see no need to change.
As I write this, the first day of the heatwave has just dawned. FEAR COMES THE SUN is the Daily Mail headline, while the Mirror has plumped for BLOWTORCH BRITAIN. The Telegraph maybe laments that its house style eschews the use of capital letters for ‘Heatwave meltdown brings Britain to a halt’. At the same time, there is a counterwave of people scoffing sceptically at all this heated alarm. The meme of a cheerful-looking sun with ‘I survived the summer of 1976’ is doing the rounds across social media, and there are a few contrary souls in public life saying that a spot of sun never did them any harm, with occasional accusations of the Met Office politically pandering to the climate change lobby.
Washington, DC Prince Harry is once again mouthing off about American politics despite a rudimentary understanding – at best – of our founding principles. The pampered Brit delivered a speech at the United Nations on Monday insisting that we are witnessing a 'rolling back of constitutional rights here in the United States'. Prince Harry, who only lives here because his wife dreams of doing animated voiceovers for Netflix, routinely opines on our constitution with all of the British pomposity that led to the Revolutionary War. Newsflash: Americans do not like it when foreigners tell us what to do or how we should feel, and yet Prince Harry (do I even have to use his title anymore?) is too arrogant and lacking in self-awareness to sit down and shut up.
It has been less than a fortnight since Boris Johnson’s premiership exploded so spectacularly just three short years after his triumphant election victory, and he became the latest Tory PM to perish at the hands of his own party. Yet two weeks on, the people who brought him down are already wondering if they hit the right man and what, or who, on Earth will follow him. This outbreak of assassins’ remorse is scarcely surprising given the parade of political pygmies and snake oil salespeople who have been demonstrating their dubious wares on our TV screens in recent days. The sad truth is that for all his manifold faults and flaws Boris Johnson is irreplaceable.
11 min listen
Tom Tugendhat has been knocked out of the Tory leadership race. With Rishi Sunak leading the pack, and Liz Truss, Penny Mordaunt and Kemi Badenoch in a cluster behind, who will come out on top? Max Jeffery speaks to Katy Balls and James Forsyth.
Every time that a picture of the Duchess of Sussex arriving at the United Nations is beamed around the world, it gets harder to avoid thinking the words: ‘she’s running’. Rumours of Meghan Markle’s presidential ambitions have been growing over the past few years, and she has done little to assuage them. Meghan’s every public utterance and appearance is carefully stage-managed in order to give the impression she has Something Important To Say, and that she may, yet, be the all-encompassing saviour an anxious America needs. But today, for once, she was not the star attraction. Instead, her husband-cum-cavaliere Prince Harry was thrust into the spotlight, with a high-profile address to the UN on Nelson Mandela day.
It's not just the Tory party that's in a bit of a mess. Fresh off the back of Partygate – and Sue Gray's findings about the disrespect shown towards Downing Street's cleaning staff – Mr S wondered just how our elected (and unelected) masters over in the Houses of Parliament have been treating their underlings. And after a two month long Freedom of Information request battle, Steerpike can bring his readers the findings. It seems that the poor men and women toiling in the toilets and turrets of the Palace of Westminster have a pretty difficult job to do. For the cleaning logs detail a number of disturbing incidents in the past 15 months.
Tory MPs are getting ready to cast their ballots in the third round of voting. Tom Tugendhat in his remarks to the 1922 Committee hustings has made clear that he is continuing on to the ballot, though he did seem to accept that he is unlikely to progress further. What Tories are watching today is to what extent does Liz Truss close the gap on Penny Mordaunt, who is currently in second. At the moment Truss is 19 votes behind. But she now has the support of Suella Braverman and her key campaign supporter, Steve Baker. So, how many of the 27 Braverman votes can Truss pick up? Truss would hope to pick up the vast majority of them, given the effectiveness of the ERG whipping operation.
