Former British Finance Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday topped the fifth round of voting to elect the next Conservative leader and prime minister of the country, PTI reported.
The vote was necessitated after Boris Johnson announced his resignation as prime minister on July 7.
Sunak, the former chancellor of the exchequer, got 137 votes while Foreign Secretary Liz Truss got the support of 113 MPs.
Trade Minister Penny Mordaunt got 105 votes and was eliminated from the race for the prime minister’s post. She had been in second place in all the earlier rounds of voting.
Sunak will now compete with Truss for the prime minister’s post.
The former finance minister expressed gratitude to his party colleagues for having put their trust in him. “I will work night and day to deliver our message around the country,” he said. “We need to restore trust, rebuild the economy and reunite our country. I’m confident that we can do that.”
Truss also thanked her supporters for putting their trust in her and said that she was ready to hit the ground running from day one.
Sunak the son-in-law of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy resigned as Britain’s finance minister on July 5, plunging Johnson’s government into a crisis.
On June 6, a no-confidence motion was introduced against Johnson after 54 Conservative Party MPs demanded that he resign. They denounced the parties organised by Johnson and his staff members during lockdowns imposed to contain the spread of coronavirus. The controversy has been famously described as the partygate scandal.
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