Britain’s next prime minister will be decided on Monday 5 September when the Conservative Party leadership race finally draws to a close after eight weeks of bitter campaigning.
Either foreign secretary Liz Truss or former chancellor Rishi Sunak will succeed Boris Johnson in 10 Downing Street once the votes of the official Tory membership, believed to be just 170,000 people, have been counted and collated.
After seeing off challenges from the likes of Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat, Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, Jeremy Hunt and others, Ms Truss and Mr Sunak have spent August campaigning at 12 Tory hustings events across the country.
The contest has been highly divisive, occasionally personal and attracted plenty of criticism over the failure of both candidates to outline their plans for addressing an increasingly alarming cost of living crisis.
Despite enjoying an initial surge in support among MPs, Mr Sunak has subsequently seen his popularity fall away as many in the party ranks hold him responsponsible for Mr Johnson’s ousting at the start of July, leaving Ms Truss all but certain to win the day, at least according to the pollsters.
Party members were sent their ballot papers between 1-5 August and have until 5pm on Friday 2 September to submit them, after which the voting closes and officials will spend the weekend totting up the results.
The winner will finally be announced in Westminster at approximately 12.30pm on Monday 5 September by Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the party’s 1922 Committee of backbenchers.
The new leader-in-waiting will then be expected to spend that afternoon and evening finalising their choices for key Cabinet positions before Mr Johnson visits Her Majesty the Queen at Balmoral, her family home in the Scottish highlands, in order to formally tender his resignation as PM on Tuesday.
The winner, be that Ms Truss or Mr Sunak, will also visit the monarch and accept her formal invitation to form a government, after which both the outgoing and incoming PMs will be expected to address the nation, something that would ordinarily take place outside of 10 Downing Street.
With those niceties over, she or he will be expected to begin announcing their senior Cabinet appointments and hold meetings with senior civil servants so that they can be handed the nuclear codes and given updates on other key matters of national security.
On Wednesday, with barely time to catch their breath, the winner will find themselves squaring up to Sir Keir Starmer at the dispatch box in the House of Commons for their first Prime Minister’s Questions at noon.
With the country’s economy in such dire straits and millions fretting over the exorbitant energy bills threatening to hit their doormats this autumn, the winner will certainly have to be ready to hit the ground running.
