Becoming the shortest serving prime minister in British history, Liz Truss has resigned after only six weeks in Number 10 Downing Street and now the question is: who will be next?
In her resignation speech, Truss said her successor would be chosen within a week, meaning the next person will be the UK’s third prime minister in just over seven weeks and the fifth Tory PM in six years.
Conservative MPs have until 2pm on Monday, UK time, to nominate candidates and those candidates will need at least 100 nominations.
There are 359 Conservative MPs in the House of Commons and it’s likely there’ll be three candidates for the prime ministership.
After that, a couple of things could happen.
First, if enough MPs supported one of the candidates, that person would automatically become party leader and prime minister.
Second, if two candidates are left, the decision will go to a ballot of members.
Many MPs are hoping that the vote doesn’t go to the party membership as this is how elected leaders in recent years have gotten into office without being considered the best candidate by their peers in parliament.
This was the case in 2015 with Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and this year with Liz Truss.
So what names are floating around as potential candidates?
Truss’ political opponent, Rishi Sunak is a likely candidate as he was the most popular candidate among Conservative lawmakers in the last election but lost the party membership vote to Truss.
Former defence secretary, Penny Mourdant is also considered a likely candidate since she only just missed out on the final two-place run off in the recent leadership challenge.
Meanwhile, many party members are signalling support for the former PM Boris Johnson to step back into office. Certainly a controversial option, however, since Johnson was pushed out of Downing Street following a series of scandals and is still facing an investigation into whether he misled parliament after holding a string of parties during COVID-19 lockdowns.
Johnson is believed to be cutting his current Caribbean holiday short to race back to the UK this weekend and throw his name out there.
Still, many have placed Sunak as the most likely option compared to Mourdant and Johnson.
Other names being passed around are Ben Wallace and Jeremy Hunt, although both have said at one point in time that they don’t intend to run.
Wallace is the UK defence secretary who won respect for his role in leading the UK’s support for Ukraine and is popular among MPs.
Britain’s new Finance Minister, Hunt, is also seen as a stable leader after ripping up Truss’ economic agenda and trying to repair the damage. Truss placed Hunt in the role following her sacking of the former Finance Minister, Kwasi Kwarteng.
Among speculation of these five candidates, there’s also been renewed calls for an immediate General Election by the Labour opposition.
The Conservative Party will be keen to avoid this, however, with the latest opinion polls showing that the Tories would suffer a landslide defeat if a General Election went ahead.