Former finance minister Rishi Sunak and foreign secretary Liz Truss will battle it out to become Britain's next prime minister after they won the final lawmaker vote, setting up the last stage of the contest to replace Boris Johnson.
Sunak has led in all rounds of the voting among Conservative lawmakers, but it is Truss who seems to have gained the advantage so far among the 200,000 members of the governing party who will ultimately choose the winner.
Eleven candidates originally put their names forward, but in a fifth and final ballot of Conservative lawmakers on Wednesday, the junior trade minister Penny Mordaunt was eliminated. Sunak won 137 votes, versus Truss’s 113 and Mordaunt's 105. Sunak said on Twitter: "Grateful that my colleagues have put their trust in me today. I will work night and day to deliver our message around the country."
"This has been one of the most unpredictable contests to be the next Conservative leader in recent history," said Chris Hopkins, the political research director at the polling company Savanta ComRes. "This has been very different to recent contests where you have had one clear favourite run away with it."
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