Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are battling it out for the position of Prime Minister of the UK

Credent TV | With Penny Mordaunt’s supporters blaming hostile briefing for eliminating her from the race, Conservatives are bracing for a “blue on blue dogfight” as Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss compete to become the next prime minister of the UK over the course of six weeks.

With 137 votes, Sunak maintained his lead over the other finalist in the MP vote to choose the two candidates. With 113 votes, Truss, the foreign secretary who had lagged behind Mordaunt during the earlier rounds, narrowly defeated Mordaunt, who received 105.

According to surveys, Truss is preferred by Conservative party members despite finishing second among MPs, with Sunak being seen as the underdog. 160,000 fee-paying members will have the opportunity to vote next month to choose who will become prime minister in early September. Half of these members are over 60, 97 percent of them are white, and the majority of them are males from southern England.

One senior supporter said that Mordaunt’s position on transgender rights, which she had to defend vigorously in the media, had cost her “a lot more than four votes”—enough MPs to secure second place if they had switched sides.

Rival campaigners acknowledge that they anticipate a challenging summer for both Sunak, the pro-Brexit former chancellor, and Truss.

A Tory source said there was little knowledge of Truss’s original support for stay in the nation, not even among party members, and claimed she had effectively positioned herself as a champion of Brexit, winning over “red wall” MPs. Be clear that Rishi will need to address that issue quickly and forcefully. Now that he is the underdog, the fighting is more brutal.

Another Tory staffer recommended that Sunak pressure Truss into making as many TV appearances as she can. They said that the more people saw her, the more support Rishi would get.

Loyal Mordaunt supporters think their candidate might have run a better campaign against Sunak. One called for “a blue on blue battle” between Sunak and Truss and cited heated exchanges in two recent televised leader debates that revealed confidential cabinet conversations.

The two will now be put to a vote by Tory members, who will cast their votes between August 1 and August 5, with the polls concluding on September 2. Three days later, the winner who will replace Boris Johnson as prime minister will be revealed.

Despite working together in Johnson’s cabinet, Truss and Sunak have already had a heated disagreement on tax and spending policies. Sunak’s approach of postponing tax cuts, according to Truss, runs the danger of sending the UK into a recession. He also dubbed her pledges of unfunded cuts as “socialist.”

With a dozen hustings planned for the summer, one Sunak supporter predicted the candidates would now adopt a more reasonable tone as the race entered its closing stages.

They added, “Both of them will be very cognizant that either of them may win, and if they do win, they’ll have to govern and attempt to bring the party together, and I believe they’ll both be mindful that you’ve got to behave yourself in a manner where it is achievable.”

However, when asked whether Sunak will keep bringing up the fact that Truss supported staying in the EU and was a former Liberal Democrat or that her strategy is socialist, the source said, “I don’t believe they were assaults. He really claimed that the proposed ideas were socialist. It was a matter of policy.

Both candidates served practically the whole of Johnson’s administration, according to Labour, who said that the contest was now between “two continuity candidates.”

Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are stooges of the Johnson government, whose fingerprints are all over the situation the nation is in right now, according to Conor McGinn, the deputy campaign organiser for Labour.

Truss and Sunak will square off in a BBC discussion on Monday night. Events for hustings are starting even earlier; one is scheduled on Thursday morning in Westminster and is being organised by the Conservative Councillors’ Association.

After Kemi Badenoch was defeated on Tuesday, one Truss supporter said that the foreign secretary had won over a sizable portion of Badenoch’s supporters throughout the course of the morning on Wednesday. According to one MP, “I don’t believe it was simply Liz’s lack of experience, I think there was a genuine policy difference between Penny and Liz, and in the end people liked more of what they saw from Liz.”

On Tuesday morning, Truss received the support of Jonathan Gullis, one of the MPs chosen in 2019. She approached Brexit with the greatest zeal and conviction, and was willing to speak bluntly, which is what folks in my district want, which is ultimately what won over many MPs, he added.

Mordaunt, a junior minister of international trade who was never a member of Johnson’s cabinet, had presented herself as an outsider providing the nation a new beginning. She had the advantage numerous times throughout the campaign, but Truss profited by gaining support from those who supported outgoing candidates on the right of the party, most notably Badenoch.

Mordaunt commended the others in a statement, but he urged them to put a stop to the fighting. Politics is difficult. It may be a challenging and polarising environment. Now, we must all collaborate to strengthen our party and concentrate on the task at hand, she remarked.

Truss thanked the lawmakers in her remarks and said that she would now “present the case to the Conservative party about my ambitious new economic strategy,” which would “reduce taxes, expand our economy, and unlock the potential of every person in our United Kingdom.”

As prime minister, she vowed to “strike the ground running,” however the tweet was later changed to “hit the ground.”

Sunak was the front-runner when the competition started, despite the fact that his wife’s non-domiciled tax status became public in April and that he had previously had a US green card while serving as chancellor. In every round, he received the most votes from the MPs and seemed to be moving forward.

Truss’s fans, on the other hand, will see Mordaunt’s late overtake as a hint that she may overtake him and go up to No. 10. The foreign secretary’s campaign got off to a sluggish start due to his rather stilted delivery and inconsistent performance in TV debates.