Former UK home secretary Priti Patel and ex-business minister Kemi Badenoch launched their bids on Sunday to become leader of the Britain’s Conservative Party.
Patel and Badenoch join Mel Stride, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick in the race to replace former prime minister Rishi Sunak as party leader.
Patel wrote on Twitter: “I am standing to be the new Leader of the Conservative Party. We must unite to win!
“I can lead us in opposition and unite our party and get us match fit for the next election, with unity, experience and strength.”
Patel said she could deliver the “experienced and strong” leadership needed to unite the Tories’ disparate factions, in an article for The Telegraph newspaper on Saturday.
As leader she would use the “huge talent pool … of Conservative Party members” to “solve the big challenges that Labour, the Lib Dems and Reform don’t have answers to”, she wrote.
She said the party was a “grass-roots movement” that should work from the bottom up rather than from the top down.
Patel wrote that “rebuilding trust with an electorate who have stopped listening to us will be tough” and that the party must “reflect honestly on what went wrong” while avoiding a “soap opera of finger-pointing and self-indulgence”.
She became an MP in 2010 and served in Cabinet positions under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, as international development secretary and home secretary respectively.
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In her article Patel echoed language used by Johnson as she wrote of turning Conservative values into “oven-ready” policies and getting the party “match fit” to win.
Johnson will not endorse any candidate in the Conservative leadership contest, The Telegraph reported earlier, citing an unnamed ally of the former prime minister.
Patel is a long-standing Eurosceptic and prominent figure on the right of the party.
As home secretary she launched a points-based immigration system and signed the agreement with Rwanda to send asylum seekers to the country.
She resigned as home secretary after Liz Truss became Tory leader.
Contenders to lead the Conservative Party need a proposer, seconder and eight other backers to stand.
The parliamentary party will narrow the field down to four, who will make their case at the Conservative Party conference, which runs from September 29 to October 2.
The final two, picked by the parliamentary party, will then go to a vote of party members in an online ballot that will close on October 31 with the result announced on November 2.
Patel is the least popular contender, at minus 28 points and seven points respectively, according to polling by Savanta carried out between July 19 and 21.
Tugendhat is the most popular potential contender among both the public, at minus three points, and 2024 Conservative voters, at 21 points, the research shows.
Cleverly is second in the running, Savanta’s findings suggest, at minus nine points with the public and 19 points among 2024 Conservative voters.
Meanwhile, Britain’s new finance minister, Rachel Reeves, will accuse the former Conservative government on Monday of committing to billions of pounds of spending that has not been properly budgeted for.
Elected to run the world’s sixth-largest economy in a landslide victory on July 4, Labour has spent much of its first three weeks in power telling the public that things are worse than expected in almost every area of public policy.
On becoming finance minister, Reeves ordered officials to conduct a fresh assessment of public funding needs which she will present to parliament on Monday and use to set the stage for her first formal budget statement later this year.
Labour Party sources said on Friday that this assessment had found a shortfall of around £20 billion (US$26 billion) and on Saturday Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office said it would “show that Britain is broke and broken”.
Late on Sunday, the finance ministry said the audit would show “the previous government overspent this year’s budgets by billions of pounds after making a series of unfunded promises”.
Reeves will also announce a new Office of Value for Money, a crackdown on government waste, reduced use of external consultants and a sell-off of unused government property, the finance ministry said.
In her planned speech to parliament, Reeves says: “The previous government refused to take the difficult decisions. They covered up the true state of the public finances. And then they ran away.”
Britain’s Conservatives dismissed these accusations as a pretext from Labour to raise taxes, after the centre-left party had ruled out raising the rates of income tax, value-added tax and other main taxes during the election campaign.
Budget forecasts in March were signed off by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, although there was widespread reporting of funding challenges in areas such as prisons and healthcare.
“Rachel Reeves is trying to con the British public into accepting Labour’s tax rises. She wants to pretend that the OBR … whose forecasting was used in all of the last Conservative government’s budgets, doesn’t exist,” said Gareth Davies, a Conservative lawmaker who speaks for the party on budget policy.
Additional reporting by Reuters
