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The race to replace Boris Johnson as UK prime minister is getting more crowded, and the big beasts are muscling in.
Sajid Javid, the former Health Minister whose resignation last week helped spark Johnson’s abrupt downfall, and former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who lost to Johnson in the 2019 leadership runoff, used interviews in the Telegraph late Saturday to announce their campaigns. Both put cutting taxes, a red-meat topic for the Conservative Party core, at the heart of the respective agendas.
In separate interviews with the newspaper, they said they’d cancel a planned rise in corporation tax and reduce it to 15% from 25%. Javid went a step further, pledging to reverse a payroll tax that was introduced by his successor as Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak.
Hunt, who turned down Johnson’s offer of a cabinet position in 2019, plans to emphasize his standing as a parliamentary backbencher outside what he called “the Boris bubble.”
They join seven other candidates including Sunak’s successor Nadhim Zahawi, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps in vying for the top role with Sunak. The most significant absentee from the starting list so far is Penny Mordaunt, the trade minister who has been touted as one of the favorites for the job.
Conservatives organizing the contest are keen to whittle down the race to a final two before Parliament goes on its summer recess on July 21. Over the next few days, barbs both political and personal will fly, and alliances will develop as candidates seek to short up support from their fellow Members of Parliament, who decide who goes through to the runoff.
In announcing his run in the Times newspaper, Johnson loyalist Shapps took a swipe at Sunak, who resigned about the same time as Javid on Tuesday.
“I have not spent the last few turbulent years plotting or briefing against the prime minister,” Shapps told the paper. “I have not been mobilising a leadership campaign behind his back.”
Sunak declared his candidacy Friday in a slick video that raised eyebrows among Tory MPs who suggested plans had been in the works for longer than a few days. And in what the Sun newspaper called the kind of dirty trick likely to sully the contest, a clip from 2007 resurfaced online showing Sunak making a dismissive comment about the working class.
Truss will launch her bid by pledging that she’ll advocate “classic Conservative principles,” the Mail on Sunday reported. Zahawi began his campaign with his own low-tax pledge and seemed to garner endorsements even before he announced, including from former Northern Ireland secretary Brandon Lewis.
Truss ranked just behind Sunak in an Opinium poll for Channel 4 News. He was backed by 25% and Truss by 21% in the survey of Conservative Party members, who will pick from the final two candidates.
In one of the more unexpected developments late Saturday, a Times journalist tweeted that Tom Tugendhat, the centrist chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee who was often critical of Johnson, won the endorsement of Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the international trade secretary and a key member of the right-wing European Research Group.
The other two declared candidates from outside Johnson’s cabinet are pro-Brexit Attorney General Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch, minister of state for equalities.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, initially seen as a favorite to succeed Johnson, said Saturday that he decided not to run.
Meanwhile, Johnson will stay on until his successor is announced, which the party said will be in September. He’s appointed a caretaker government which he insists will not “make major changes of direction.”
The 1922 Committee of rank-and-file Tory MPs is drawing up plans for an accelerated leadership contest. The two finalists will then embark on a six-week tour of the UK, and more than 100,000 Conservative party members will decide who moves into 10 Downing Street.
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