LONDON: In a tweet announcing his candidacy, Mr Sunak said the UK faces “a profound economic crisis”, adding: “The choice our party makes now will decide whether the next generation of British people will have more opportunities than the last.”That’s why I am standing to be your next prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party. I want to fix our economy, unite our party and deliver for our country.”
Announcing his bid to once again run for Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, former finance minister and MP Rishi Sunak said on Sunday (October 23) he wants to fix the economy and unite the Conservative Party. Sunak had earlier thrown his hat in the ring in July, raising the possibility of the first ever non-white, Indian-origin prime minister of the UK. After some weeks of campaigning, however, Conservative party members chose Liz Truss over Sunak. With Truss’s resignation, can Sunak become the next UK prime minister?
Britain’s former finance minister was the most popular candidate among Conservative lawmakers at Westminster in a leadership contest earlier this year but, after getting through to a run-off against Truss, he lost out in a vote involving some 170,000 party members who made the final decision.
Britain’s Prime Minister Liz Truss’s resignation after 44 catastrophic days in office has triggered a new race for the leadership of the Conservative party. There’s no clarity yet about who will succeed Truss whose stint as prime minister was punctuated by one catastrophic crisis after another.
Many members were angry when Sunak quit in July, helping to trigger a rebellion that eventually brought down Boris Johnson. They also ignored his warning that markets could lose confidence in Britain if Truss delivered her unfunded tax cuts.
A former defence secretary, Mordaunt was a passionate supporter of leaving the European Union who only just missed out on the final two-place run off in the recent leadership challenge. Mordaunt won plaudits for her performance in parliament on Monday, when she defended the government even as it reversed most of its policies.
After Truss’s economic program collapsed and she fired her finance minister, she turned to Hunt, a former health and foreign minister, to put things right. A series of confident performances on television and in the House of Commons, as he ripped up Truss’s economic manifesto, have already led to some Conservative lawmakers referring to Hunt as the “real prime minister”. He has insisted he does not want the top job, despite entering two previous races to become prime minister, including in 2019 when he lost out in the final round to former prime minister Johnson. Hunt does not have the obvious support of a large group of lawmakers in parliament.
Britain’s defence secretary is one of the few ministers to have emerged from recent political turmoil with his credibility enhanced. Wallace, a former soldier, was defence minister for both Johnson and Truss, leading Britain’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Popular with party members, he surprised many earlier this year when he said he wouldn’t run for the leadership, saying he wanted to focus on his current job.

Former prime minister Boris Johnson, a journalist, has loomed large over British politics ever since he became London Mayor in 2008. After causing trouble for leaders such as David Cameron and Theresa May, he finally became prime minister in 2019 and went on to win a landslide election victory. Johnson was the face of the Brexit vote and won votes in parts of the country that had never voted Conservative before. But he was forced out by a string of scandals. Some closest to him say at the moment he is more interested in making money on the speech circuit than returning to frontline politics.
(With Media Reports)

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