Liz Truss beats Rishi Sunak in Tory leadership race to be new UK PM

TIL Desk/World/London/ United Kingdom foreign secretary Liz Truss on Monday won the hard-fought Conservative Party leadership race, beating Rishi Sunak to go on to replace outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson — loyalty to whom seems to have gone against the Indian-origin former chancellor in a result that was much closer than predicted.

The 47-year-old senior Cabinet minister was widely expected to become Britain’s third female Prime Minister after over 170,000 online and postal votes cast by Tory members, ending Sunak’s historic run as the first member of Parliament of Indian heritage to compete for the top job at 10 Downing Street.

Truss polled 81,326 votes, compared to Sunak’s 60,399 in an election with a high turnout of 82.6 per cent, with 654 rejected ballots from a total of 172,437 eligible Tory voters. It means Truss did win by a comfortable margin, but her victory was slimmer than in other recent Tory leadership contests at 57.4 per cent to Sunak’s 42.6 per cent — reflecting a divide within the governing party.

Sunak, 42, soon took to Twitter to call for party unity: ‘Thank you to everyone who voted for me in this campaign. I’ve said throughout that the Conservatives are one family.’ ‘It’s right we now unite behind the new PM, Liz Truss, as she steers the country through difficult times,’ a former chancellor of the Exchequer said. In her acceptance speech, Truss declared: ‘We will deliver, we will deliver, and we will deliver.’