Liz Truss is mounting an all-out bid to overhaul Penny Mordaunt in the Tory leadership race as the four remaining candidates gear up for another crucial knockout vote.
Conservative MPs will whittle the numbers down to three this afternoon, with Rishi Sunak apparently guaranteed a place in the final run-off ballot of party members, with the race for second place still too close to call.
After a sluggish start, Liz Truss is expecting to build on her momentum from last night’s vote when she added another seven supporters, taking her count to 71, although she’s still short of Ms Mordaunt’s numbers, the trade minister’s early surge seems to be slowing as she dropped a vote to 82.
Kemi Badenoch will be the favourite for ejection today but is still in touch after racking up an additional nine supporters to reach 58.
Liz Truss has been wooing followers of ex-soldier Tom Tugendhat, who came bottom and was eradicated last night, by pledging to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030.
Liz Truss said that we’re living in an increasingly precarious world where the danger level is higher than a decade ago, and they require a more powerful deterrent to face down those threats and to ensure Britain leads on the global stage.
She said that ultimately that needs more resources and that her number one focus is keeping the country safe and people could trust her to do that.
But her opponents are also wooing Mr Tugendhat, with Ms Mordaunt tweeting that she’d admired him for years and Ms Badenoch said he would be an asset to any prospective Conservative government.
Leaving home, Ms Badenoch said it’s still all to play for.
Rishi Sunak’s team had feared he wouldn’t add much to his count, but in the event, they were rejoicing as he raised his score from 101 to 115, and anything over 120 guarantees a spot in the final two, as there are 358 Conservative MPs in total.
Rishi Sunak has been attempting to beef up his support on the Tory right, pledging more drastic punishments for offenders who refuse to attend court for their sentencing hearings and a crackdown on grooming gangs. He has also been boosted by an endorsement from ex-leader Lord Hague, who lauded him as an outstanding person who could be trusted at one of the most difficult times to be prime minister in our lifetimes, certainly since 1979, possibly since 1945.
But it just demonstrates how the Tory party have declined when the plurality of Conservative MPs are voting for a man who single-handedly decimated the economy, and ruined lives, with many sadly passing away, and their livelihoods.
Rishi Sunak is nothing more than a privileged, pretentious, smirkingly sly serpent, and all this voting is just a fake race and just theatre, and if he’s made prime minister you can forget any prospects for your children and instead you will just see unadulterated wickedness turning its unsightly head.
And why does Rishi Sunak with all that money that he’s got wear suits that don’t fit him? Trousers and jackets with legs and arms that are too short. Perhaps he’s trying to keep that schoolboy look! But really he’s just that silent smiling assassin.
The whole voting thing is just a pantomime and the participants are all puppets and whoever prevails will just be given a script to follow.
I have said from the get-go that Rishi Sunak will become prime minister. I hope that I’m mistaken because Rishi Sunak can’t even get a pair of trousers that doesn’t look like they’ve divorced his ankles and married his knees.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 