Hunt backs Sunak’s campaign after losing out in first ballot – as it happened

Jeremy Hunt has backed Rishi Sunak to be the next prime minister.

The former health secretary lost out in his bid to replace Boris Johnson earlier today after failing to get the required 30 nominations.

Sunak is “one of the most decent, straight people with the highest standard of integrity that I have ever met in British politics”, Hunt told the BBC. “In a period when we need to rebuild trust with the electorate that shows we are in tune with modern Britain.”

The culture secretary has been one of the prime minister’s most ardent supporters, sticking by him even as support for his leadership collapsed at Westminster, PA reported.

In a pre-released clip from BBC Panorama, Dorries says:

I was quite stunned that there were people who thought that removing the prime minister who won the biggest majority that we’ve had since Margaret Thatcher in less than three years.

Just the the anti-democratic nature of what they’re doing alone was enough to alarm me. And for me it was a coup.

The full interview will air later on Wednesday.

Rishi Sunak is discovering that hell hath no fury like the Daily Mail scorned, as the rightwing newspaper dedicates itself to destroying the former chancellor’s bid to be Tory leader.

In the week since Boris Johnson was deposed, the newspaper has remained steadfastly loyal to the outgoing prime minister – and steadfastly opposed to those such as Sunak who helped to force him out of office.

Friday’s front page asked the question: “What the hell have they done?” and blamed a party “in the grip of collective hysteria” for forcing a leadership election.

The following day the 1.4 million people who buy the Mail’s Saturday print edition were informed that the MPs who had deposed Johnson – such as Sunak – were “Tory traitors” who had opened the door to Keir Starmer entering Downing Street as leader of “a coalition of chaos”.

Here are three takeaways from the first ballot numbers.

1) The results confirm that Rishi Sunak is the frontrunner among MPs. He had 55 publicly declared supporters, he has comfortably outperformed that total, and he is ahead of his nearest rival by a decent margin. He is also well placed to scoop up many of Jeremy Hunt’s votes, because he has (perhaps improbably) become the lead candidate for the Tory leftish/mainstream who were Hunt’s main backers.

2) But the real story is that these results firm up Penny Mordaunt’s credentials as the “Stop Sunak” candidate. She had 38 publicly declared votes previously, and is now well ahead of Liz Truss. It is hard – but not impossible – to see how she does not get on to the final ballot for party members, and current polling suggests she would then win by a mile. (See 2.47pm.) That might change, of course; her campaign could implode over the next few weeks. But she looks like even more of a favourite than she was.

3) Liz Truss, who at one point was seen as favourite to succeed Boris Johnson, is struggling. Her pitch has been that she was the candidate most capable of defeating Sunak. But she can no longer make that case on the basis of these results, and it is not even obvious that she should remain the lead candidate for the Tory right. Between them, Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman have more votes than she does. The pressure for the right to agree on a candidate who can get on to the final ballot will intensify. Braverman may be tempted to pull out before the ballot tomorrow (she probably won’t get any votes from Hunt supporters, and Nadhim Zahawi’s backers will want to transfer to someone more successful). But Badenoch may well decide to contest at least one more round.

The main focus over the next few hours will be on what the weaker performers still in the contest decide to do. Braverman will come under pressure to concede. Tom Tugendhat may stay in – he would pick up some Hunt votes – but he may decide that now it’s time to cut his losses, and endorse Sunak when he has maximum bargaining power. Badenoch is having a good run, and it would be surprising if she were to quit now.

Sir Graham Brady, chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee, is announcing the results of the first ballot.

Rishi Sunak - 88 votes

Penny Mordaunt - 67

Liz Truss - 50

Kemi Badenoch - 40

Tom Tugendhat - 37

Suella Braverman - 32

Nadhim Zahawi - 25

Jeremy Hunt - 18

He says that means Hunt and Zahawi are out of the contest. The others will go ahead to the second ballot tomorrow.

Sir Graham Brady, the 1922 Committee chair, will announce the results of the first round of voting in the leadership contest at 5pm.

Voting has now finished in the first ballot for the Tory leadership.

From Alain Tolhurst from Politics Home

From the BBC’s Peter Saull

From the Sun’s Kate Ferguson

The government is to table a confidence motion in itself after rejecting a version by Labour that directly criticised Boris Johnson, my colleague Jessica Elgot reports.

Penny Mordaunt would beat all other candidates in the Tory leadership contest in the final ballot of member - very easily, a YouGov poll for the Times suggests. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, would prove the strongest opponent. But Mordaunt, an international trade minister, would beat her by 55% to 37%, the poll suggests. She would beat Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, by 67% to 28%, the poll suggests.

The figures are based on a poll of a weighted sample of 876 members.

The findings are similar to the results of a survey of about 950 Conservative party members published by the ConservativeHome website yesterday. That also found Mordaunt on course to beat all rivals, and some of the ConHome results match the YouGov ones reasonably closely. ConHome has Mordaunt beating Truss by 51% to 33%, and beating Sunak by 58% to 31%.

The main difference is that the ConHome survey implied Kemi Badenoch is the candidate with the best chance of beating Mordaunt. It had Mordaunt beating her by just 46% to 40%. YouGov has Mordaunt winning that contest by 59% to 30%. But the ConHome survey is not weighted, and many of its respondents are presumably readers of the website, which was given Badenoch some particularly good positive coverage recently.

The ConHome results attracted less attention than they otherwise might have done because they coincided with an Opinium poll of party members suggesting Sunak would beat Truss and Mordaunt on the final ballot for members.

But the Opinium fieldwork was carried out between 6 and 8 July. (Its sample was smaller too - 493 people.) YouGov’s fieldwork took place between 12 and 13 July. Given that it is more up to date, and that it coincides with the results of the ConHome survey (which has a good track record in these contests), YouGov is probably the better guide to the state of the contest.

Only a third of the UK population trust the government, according to statistics published this morning by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The survey was carried out in March as “Partygate” and high profile scandals involving controversies over government cronyism, rule-breaking, and lies dominated the political headlines.

Levels of trust varied by type of government institution, however: the civil service was trusted by 55% of those surveyed, and local government by over 40%. Political parties were trusted by just 20% of respondents.

Trust was far higher in public services: the NHS recorded 80% trust levels, followed by the courts and legal system (68%). Police and education each scored over 60%. High levels of trust were associated with high levels of satisfaction with services.

The ONS survey was carried out as part of a wider study involving OECD countries. This showed UK government trust levels of 35% (around 50% said they did not trust the government) were slightly below the OECD average of 41%.

Polled on political participation, 57% of ONS respondents said they had signed a petition, 56% said they had voted in the last local election, and 27% had boycotted certain products for political reasons. Just 18% said they had posted or forwarded political content on social media

That wasn’t meant to be Boris Johnson’s last PMQs. But it sounded as if, mentally, he has already checked out, and as if he has other plans for 12pm next Wednesday. That was one implication of his final answer to Keir Stamer, where he said:

The next leader of my party may be elected by acclamation, so it is possible this will be our last confrontation, it is possible.

So, I want to thank him for the style in which he conducted himself. I think it would be fair to say he has been considerably less lethal than many other members of this house.

It is perfectly true that I leave not at a time of my choosing, it is absolutely true, but I am proud of the fantastic teamwork that has been involved in all of those projects both nationally and internationally, and I am also proud of the leadership that I have given.

I will be leaving with my head held high.

No 10 are saying that Johnson does intend to do PMQs next week. But this did sound very valedictory, and it is possible, of course, that the No 10 press office has not yet been told about the trip to Ukraine, or the mystery bout of Covid, or some other hypothetical that might stop Johnson being PM next Wednesday.

Both of those sound more probable than the scenario mentioned by Johnson as a possible reason for another PM being in place next week - a decision by Tory MPs to elect a new leader by acclamation, bypassing the need for a vote of party members. There is precedent for this; it is what happened when Andrea Leadsom made the final shortlist of two and subsequently pulled out, leaving Theresa May elected party leader without a membership ballot. But Conservative HQ wants the members to have a say (May’s premiership arguably suffered because she had not acquired a personal mandate), and leadership candidates have had to promise that they won’t do a Leadsom as a condition for being allowed to take part. So what on earth was Johnson on about?

Sky’s Beth Rigby has wondered if this all part of strong-arming Liz Truss into No 10. But that would involve her getting onto the final ballot (likely, but not inevitable), and the other candidate (Rishi Sunak?) pulling out (very, very unlikely).

If that was Johnson’s final PMQs, it was bereft of anything solemn or deep. (Tony Blair produced the best PMQs departure quotes in modern times.) But Johnson was astonishingly upbeat and chipper, all things considering. It wasn’t a performance to persuade Tory MPs that they might have made a mistake, but it was a testament to his resilience. Keir Starmer had plenty of good jibes about the Tory leadership candidates, but today they just bounced off.

Jacob Young (Con) says the people of Redcar are grateful for what Johnson achieved. And people are grateful to him for delivering Brexit. Is the PM optimistic about the future?

Johnson says people think his departure means “the end of Brexit”. They are wrong, he says.

“I really am going to miss this weekly nonsense from him,” Starmer says.

He quotes from Rishi Sunak’s resignation letter, saying it implied the PM could not tell the truth. Now Sunak says he wants to fix the economy. Can he think of any jobs Sunak has done that might have had an impact on the economy?

Johnson says the next Tory leader might be elected by acclamation. So this might be his last PMQs, he claims.

(Almost no one expects that, and the Tory election rules say this should not happen.)

Johnson says Starmer has been “considerably less lethal” than other Labour leaders.

He says it is true that he is leaving “not at a time of my choosing”. But he is proud of the initiatives he has started, and the leadership he has shown. He goes on:

I will be leaving soon with my head held high.

The two Alba MPs, Neale Hanvey and Kenny MacAskill, are ordered out for being disruptive. They are former SNP MPs; Alba is the party set up by Alex Salmond.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, pulled out of giving evidence to the home affairs select committee today at the eleventh hour. It is highly unusual for a government minister to do this. She was due to be probed about controversial issues such as the policy to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, Windrush and Home Office culture and problems at the passport office.

In a letter to the committee, Patel attributed her absence to the recent changes in government and to the ministerial team in her department along with “wider unprecedented changes” as a reason for her failure to attend the evidence session. She suggested postponing until September.

However, in a strong response, committee chair Dame Diana Johnson (Lab) wrote:

You are still the home secretary and in a statement you released last week you implied that you did not resign from government because you felt ‘the position of home secretary demands the holder of office to be entirely focused on the business of government and our national security’.

We would therefore ask why, a week on, you now feel it is acceptable to avoid a key element of the role – facing up to much needed scrutiny of that essential work.

Johnson said the committee expected Patel to give evidence next Wednesday, rather than the September date the home secretary proposed.

Boris Johnson will be taking PMQs in 10 minutes.

It will be his first since he announced he was resigning last week, and almost certainly his second last ever. After PMQs next week, the summer recess starts – and a new PM is meant to be in place by the time of the first PMQs in September.

And this is what political journalists and commentators are saying about Penny Mordaunt’s launch.

From the author and broadcaster Steve Richards

From the i’s Paul Waugh

From ITV’s Paul Brand

From Darren McCaffrey from GB News

From Talk TV’s Kate McCann

At the start of a leadership contest the best place to be positioned is far, far ahead – the undisputed runaway favourite (Gordon Brown in 2007). But normally the favourite is only slightly ahead, and in those circumstances it often helps to be a little behind (plausible, but not the frontrunner), gaining momentum and new/interesting/relatively unknown (David Cameron in early 2005). People get bored easily, and so outsider candidates are like a new date.

All this helps to explain why Mordaunt is getting plaudits for her launch, and why the prospect of her being the next Tory leader seems a tiny bit closer than it was first thing this morning. She was confident, interesting, and articulate. In the Conservative party having a forces background is equivalent to coming from a mining family in the Labour party, and Mordaunt’s record on this is impeccable. Her father was in the army, she has been a Royal Navy reservist, and she represents a naval city (Portsmouth), which is close to to where she grew up. She invoked the spirit of the Falklands in her speech (see 10.37am) and this passage was more inspiring than anything any of her rivals have come up with.

As for the rest of it, it was less memorable. But she did make a stab at talking about policy, in a way that implies she has given some thought to how she would govern the country (although God knows what she meant when she talked about aligning the government and business/charity planning cycles). She was less eager to offer implausible promises on tax cuts than many other candidates have been. She is a Brexiter who’s acceptable to Tory one-nation types, and she said nothing today to alienate either faction, while still managing to sound interesting, competent and not objectionable.

She also handled the media skilfully, with soundbite answers on the “Can a woman have a penis?” type questions (see 10.53am and 10.57am) that Labour politicians – who have mostly been tied in knots by these questions – could learn from.

There is still a huge amount that could go wrong with Mordaunt’s campaign. And this was only a launch. But it was a successful one.

Conservative leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat has denied taking a potshot at Rishi Sunak after saying that defence spending should be protected from “bean counters or spreadsheets”.

Speaking outside parliament, he also insisted that the contest should go all the way to a party members’ vote “because otherwise democracy in the party will be undermined”.

The former soldier and chair of the foreign affairs committee, told journalists:

When we are talking about defence spending we have got to be absolutely clear that we will never put the safety of our country in doubt because of bean counters or spreadsheets. Security always comes before spreadsheets.

So this is one of those moments where we have got to be very, very careful as we fight this battle of ideas that we make sure that what we are doing is reinforcing British strength.

Challenged on whether he was having a go at Sunak – who reportedly resisted pressure for a big increase in UK defence spending when he was chancellor and who has insisted that Britain should not be told “comforting fairytales” about spending – Tugendhat said that he was not. He told reporters:

I am not going to name anyone, but it’s absolutely up to you to look quite hard at where people are talking about various things and just where different people are putting their aim and putting their targets, as it were, for defence.

Q: Was Boris Johnson a good prime minister?

Mordaunt says: “I think we should thank him for delivering Brexit – it was an incredibly difficult thing to do – and I think we should remember him for that.”

Mordaunt says if the Tories do not win the next election, the prospect of Brexit gains will be lost. She is the candidate most likely to win the election for the Tories, she says. She goes on:

I am the candidate that Labour fear the most.

(This is probably more than an idle boast. Some Labour figures say the same in private.)

Q: People don’t know who you are. If you win, will you call an election to get a mandate?

Mordaunt says she stood on the same platform as other MPs. They have a mandate. The British people want them to get on and deliver it, she says.

Penny Mordaunt is holding her campaign launch.

She is introduced by Andrea Leadsom, the former cabinet minister, who describes her as totally honourable.

Mordaunt says she has been undertaking the equivalent of parliamentary speed-dating as she has been meeting MPs.

MPs are people who want to serve, she says. They are people who want to take responsibility. She says she has asked herself why.

In her case, it goes back to being a nine-year-old watching the Falklands task force leave Portsmouth. She says she did not know much about it at the time, but she knew that her country stood up to bullies. And that was important – important enough for some of her classmates’ fathers not to return home.

She says Britain does not need a new role in the world. “We just need to be ourselves.”

Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor who is seen as the frontrunner in the Tory leadership contest, has given an interview to the Daily Telegraph in which he has presented his economic approach as “common sense Thatcherism”. He told the paper:

We will cut taxes and we will do it responsibly. That’s my economic approach. I would describe it as common sense Thatcherism. I believe that’s what she would have done.

Sunak also suggested that his upbringing, as the son of a chemist, had some parallels with Thatcher’s. He explained:

If you read her speeches – and I’ve quoted her and Nigel Lawson [the former Tory chancellor] in other lectures I’ve given – her approach to these things was to make sure that as a nation you have to earn what you spend.

She talked about the person at home with their family budget. She talked about that really powerfully. That resonated with me, because that’s how I was brought up.

My mum was a small businesswoman, she was a chemist. I worked in my mum’s small chemist in Southampton. I did my mum’s books – that was part of my job. I also did payroll and accounts every week and every month.

Nadhim Zahawi has also being doing a media round this morning. Here are the highlights.

• Zahawi said he would be willing to offer Boris Johnson a cabinet job. Asked about this on LBC, he said:

Boris Johnson is a friend of mine of 30 years. If he wishes to serve in cabinet, I would certainly offer him a job.

There is precedent for a former prime minister returning to cabinet in a more junior role; Alec Douglas-Home was foreign secretary under Edward Heath after a brief spell as PM in the early 1960s. But it is generally assumed that Johnson would not want to return to cabinet, and that he would prefer to focus on books, giving speeches and earning lots of money.

• Zahawi described Johnson as “probably the most consequential prime minister of his generation”. He told LBC:

[Johnson] has been probably the most consequential prime minister of his generation. If you go back to Margaret Thatcher, John Major, then Tony Blair, and of course, Gordon Brown, and then David Cameron and Theresa May and now Boris Johnson. He’s delivered Brexit.

Given how transformative Brexit has been, this is plausible. (Transformative is not the same as good.)

• Zahawi said that he would only cut income tax when inflation was falling. He told the Today programme:

What I’m talking about is bringing forth income tax up to next year when I hope to see inflation abate, and of course interest rates return to levels lower than today.

This clarification aligns Zahawi’s tax position – which was widely condemned as unrealistic when first unveiled – most closely with Rishi Sunak’s. Zahawi also that said his plans for tax cuts were fully costed, and that he would release full details later.

• He defended his decision to issue an open letter last Thursday morning saying Johnson should step down, only about 36 hours after agreeing to serve Johnson as chancellor. He said that by then the number of ministerial resignations had persuaded him that “we couldn’t realistically have a functioning government” and that his actions showed he was putting the country first.

• He confirmed that he was not ruling out taking the UK out of the European convention on human rights and abolishing the BBC licence fee. Both issues were raised with candidates last night at a hustings with the rightwing Common Sense group of Tory MPs. On the ECHR, Zahawi said:

Nothing is off the table. What I hope will happen is that the domestic legislation that [justice secretary] Dominic Raab is introducing will allow us to deliver the Rwanda policy. It is an important policy to deliver.

And on the BBC he said:

We have to review how the BBC is funded. We have to look at how it is sustainable in the future. We have to review everything. Nothing is off the table.

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, has denied Rishi Sunak’s Conservative leadership campaign has engaged in “dirty tricks”, my colleague Amelia Hill reports.

Good morning. Today MPs vote in the first round of the ballot for the Tory leadership. At least one candidate should definitely be eliminated (the one who comes last) and it is possible that two or three more might drop out to, because they fail to hit the 30-vote threshold for proceeding to the next round.

The contest is probably more open than any previous Tory leadership contest at this stage (on the morning of the first ballot) since 2005, but two assessments seem reasonably sound: 1) that Rishi Sunak is the frontrunner and the MP most likely to be on the final ballot; 2) that Liz Truss is probably the lead candidate for the right and the most plausible continuity Johnson figure (his most loyal allies are supporting her), but that her inclusion on the final ballot is less assured than Sunak’s.

Today’s results should give us some sense of how sound both these propostions are.

The candidate posing the biggest challenge to Sunak and Truss is probably Penny Mordaunt, the former defence secretary who is now an international trade minister. A Brexiter but with a background in Tory one-nation politics (she used to work for David Willetts), and a minister with cabinet experience but who was never part of the Johnson clique and who would be regarded by voters as a fresh start, Mordaunt would beat all other candidates in the final ballot for members, a survey yesterday suggested.

Part of the reason why Mordaunt does well in these surveys is because she is relatively unknown and has not taken strong positions on many policy issues, and so she has not alienated many potential supporters yet. (Admittedly, this did not work for Rehman Chishti.) But today Mordaunt will launch her campaign, and have to start saying what she stands for.

In an article for the Times’ Red Box, she says as prime minister she would prioritise help for families, putting a cabinet minister in charge of this portfolio. She says:

My government will revise the early years and childcare system. This will involve both listening to sector professionals who are already feeding into a live consultation on childcare, and appointing a cabinet-level minister with overall responsibility for family policy.

Families come in all shapes and sizes, and my own experience as a child carer for my mum when she was terminally ill has left me with a profound commitment to helping every family to live well.

I believe parents and carers are best placed to decide what’s right for their child. So I plan to move away from a policy of fixed entitlements to tax-free childcare, and instead create a new system of personalised budgets that will allow every child to access their entitlement to subsidised childcare at a time most suited to their family needs.

Family policy did not get a lot of attention during the Johnson years. That might have something to do with the fact that Johnson was never keen to talk about his own, and would not even say how many children there are in his extended family network.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Mick Lynch, the RMT general secretary, gives evidence to the Commons transport committee about the rail strikes. Tim Shoveller, chief negotiator at Network Rail and Steve Montgomery, chair of the Rail Delivery Group, are also giving evidence.

10am: Priti Patel, the home secretary, gives evidence to the Commons home affairs committee.

10.30am: Penny Mordaunt launches her campaign for the Tory leadership.

12pm: Boris Johnson faces Keir Starmer at what is expected to be Johnson’s penultimate PMQs.

1.30pm: Voting starts in the first round of the Tory leadership contest. The ballot closes at 3.30pm, and the result will be announced soon afterwards.

2.30pm: Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and lord chancellor, gives evidence to the Lords constitution committee.

I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

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