Tory battle to succeed Johnson takes shape as Patel opts out

Bloomberg

The race to succeed Boris Johnson as UK prime minister is taking shape as two Conservative big hitters, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, opted out ahead of the first round of voting.
Patel’s move is likely to favor Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s bid to be the preferred candidate of the low-tax, Thatcherite wing of the Tory party that is mobilizing to prevent the current front-runner, Rishi Sunak, from being named prime minister when the contest concludes in September.
Meanwhile Sunak gained the backing of both Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab and Shapps, who announced his withdrawal as a candidate on Tuesday.
In the early running, many of the candidates have been trying to out-do themselves with promises to cut taxes and to appeal to the Tory right, just as Johnson tried to do whenever his position came under pressure.
Tax Promises
That has made Sunak, whose resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer set the wheels in motion for Johnson’s downfall, a target for the prime minster’s remaining allies. Sunak used the launch of his leadership campaign to hit back at his Tory rivals, who have been proposing a plethora of tax cuts combined with spending promises and criticizing his time at the top of the UK Treasury.
“Once we have gripped inflation, I will get the tax burden down,” Sunak said in a speech in London on Tuesday. “It is a question of ‘when’, not ‘if’.”
The field of candidates is starting to narrow before the cut off at 6 pm, when contenders need to show they have the backing of 20 Tory MPs to make it onto the ballot.
Sunak currently has the largest number of public endorsements from his fellow MPs, followed by Trade minister Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat, chair of Parliament’s foreign affairs select committee.
But many Conservative MPs have not yet pledged any allegiance, so the picture is likely to change when the first round of voting is held on Wednesday. The person with the lowest number of votes gets knocked out, plus anyone receiving fewer than 30 votes. The next ballot is scheduled for Thursday. Once MPs have shrunk the list of contenders down to a final two, it is the estimated 175,000 members of the Conservative party who ultimately decide who enters No. 10 Downing Street in the fall. In that phase, it’s not Sunak but Mordaunt who currently leads the way, according to a survey by the ConservativeHome website anticipating the outcome of a final run-off.
Sunak would also lose to Kemi Badenoch, who has the backing of Conservative big-hitter Michael Gove and is seen as a rising star of the Tory right, Truss and Attorney General Suella Braverman in a head-to-head vote among grassroots Tories, according to the findings.
It means whoever emerges as the preferred candidate of the right of the party stands a good chance of being the ultimate winner. On Tuesday, Truss won the potentially key backing of Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, both staunch Johnson supporters.

Proper Euroskeptic’
“She’s a proper euroskeptic, she’ll deliver for the voters and believes in low taxation,” Rees-Mogg told Sky News. “When we discussed taxation, Liz was always opposed to Rishi’s higher taxes. That again is proper conservatism.”
Two other campaigns have urged Braverman to pull out of the race to allow a more senior figure to progress, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Sunak’s major handicap is that he raised the UK’s tax burden to its highest level since the 1940s as chancellor to pay for pandemic-era spending, a record that sits uneasily with many Conservative MPs.
In his final months in office before resigning, Sunak resisted calls to cut taxes for fear of fueling inflation, which is forecast to exceed 11% in the UK in October.