Liz Truss will go head-to-head with Rishi Sunak in the race to become Britain’s next prime minister as the bookmakers and opinion polls put the foreign secretary as the favourite to succeed Boris Johnson.
After five bruising rounds of voting by Tory MPs, Truss and Sunak will battle it out over the summer for the support of 150,000 members to succeed Johnson as the party’s next leader.
Although the former chancellor received the biggest vote among MPs, Truss is the favourite to win the contest based on her popularity with party members. According to Ladbrokes, the odds of her being the next Conservative party leader are 4/7, while Sunak is at 11/8.
While Sunak is pursuing a similar economic platform to his time as Johnson’s chancellor and is chiefly focused on tackling inflation, the more rightwing Truss has pledged sweeping tax cuts and deregulation.
Sunak, who came first in every voting round, won the support of 137 MPs, followed by Truss on 113. Penny Mordaunt, the trade minister who was in second place until the final vote, was eliminated.
The focus of the contest will move from Westminster to the wider Tory party. The first televised debate between Sunak and Truss will take place on Monday, followed by a dozen regional hustings. Ballot papers will be sent out in early August and the result announced on September 5.
In a video message to his supporters, Sunak said he was the “only” person who could beat Labour at the next election. “We need to restore trust, rebuild the economy and reunite the country. I’m confident we can do that and we’ve got a really positive message to take out to our members.”
Truss meanwhile emphasised her experience in government. “I’m the person who can go into Number 10, I can hit the ground running and I can get things done,” she said.
Opinion polls suggest Truss leads Sunak among Tory party members, with many activists disliking his record as a tax-raising chancellor and his perceived disloyalty to Johnson.
But Sunak’s supporters stressed his background in the government’s most important economic post, his debate performances and polling that suggested he is best placed to beat Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer.
The Sunak and Truss campaigns are braced for the campaign to become more personal. The former chancellor is likely to be attacked by allies of Johnson for his economic record, while the foreign secretary will face criticism for supporting Remain in the 2016 referendum.
Senior Labour party figures said that Truss and Sunak would both be easy targets if they became prime minister during the cost of living crisis.
“The one candidate we feared was Boris Johnson, and he has gone,” said a member of the shadow cabinet. “He had this bizarre ability to somehow distance himself from day-to-day events, to be above blame somehow, and no one else in his party has that.”