Britain prime minister rishi sunak anagram, like margaret thatcher and cut taxes
Sunak is in the lead in the vote to replace the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
After the first round, the former chancellor of the Exchequer was in the lead, while an unknown trade minister came in second.
Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the Exchequer, stayed in the lead after Tuesday's first round of the Conservative Party's race to replace Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
But Penny Mordaunt, a junior trade minister who isn't as well known, came in a strong second place in the vote of Conservative lawmakers. And, according to a new poll, she has a strong lead among the party's regular members. This means that she could soon replace Mr. Sunak as the favorite.
In a secret vote that was more like a papal conclave than a national vote, 357 Conservative lawmakers chose their next leader. This person will become Britain's fourth prime minister in six years.
After the first round, there were still six people running. Two candidates were kicked out because they didn't get the support of at least 30 members of Parliament. One of them was Nadhim Zahawi, who replaced Mr. Sunak as chancellor after he resigned last week, which led to Mr. Johnson's removal.
It was the first of several rounds of party ballots this week that are meant to narrow the large field of candidates down to just two. They will spend a busy summer trying to win over the party members, who are a larger but still small group. In early September, Mr. Johnson's replacement will be chosen by the party members.
The strange way the process works has already led to a few surprises: Mr. Sunak was expected to be the front-runner, and he got a good number of votes (88), but Ms. Mordaunt got 67 votes, which put her close to him. Liz Truss, who is the foreign secretary, got 50 votes and came in third place.
In a poll done by the market research company YouGov, Ms. Mordaunt, who is the daughter of a paratrooper and serves in the Royal Naval Reserve, is far ahead of Mr. Sunak, Ms. Truss, and all the other candidates.
Kemi Badenoch, who got 40 votes, and Suella Braverman, who got 32 votes, made it through. This kept their hopes alive, but it also made it more likely that the hard-line Brexiteers would vote for Ms. Truss.
Tom Tugendhat, who is running as an outsider and is the head of Parliament's Foreign Affairs committee, also made it to the second round with 37 votes.
Jeremy Hunt, a former foreign secretary who ran against Mr. Johnson for leader in 2019 but lost, got the least amount of votes, with 18. Mr. Tugendhat would hope to get some votes from Mr. Hunt, who is in the middle, in later rounds.
With only 25 votes, Mr. Zahawi may have been the biggest disappointment of the day. He had become a rising star in the party thanks to how well he managed the rollout of coronavirus vaccines by the government last year.
But his critics said he was acting strangely last week when he first took a good job from Mr. Johnson and then was asked to quit a day later. There were also questions about Mr. Zahawi's business dealings, which made him feel like he was the target of a campaign to hurt his reputation.
With so many candidates vying for attention in the early days of the campaign, the debates have been all over the place and not very deep. A lot of what happened was back-and-forth between the candidates, who were eager to win the votes of those who dropped out.
To make things even more confusing, Mr. Johnson said that his replacement could happen faster if the second-place candidate dropped out after the first round and the leader was chosen by acclamation.
Later, Downing Street said that if the winner was chosen on September 5, as the party committee running the election had planned, Mr. Johnson would give Queen Elizabeth II his formal resignation the next day.
At one of his last Prime Minister's Questions sessions, Mr. Johnson said, "I'm leaving with my head held high," even though he had been involved in a series of scandals that eventually turned his party and cabinet against him.
Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, used most of his questions to ask Mr. Johnson what he thought about people who don't live in Britain but pay taxes there. This shows that his rivals are already starting to move on from him.
This is what Akshata Murthy, who is married to Mr. Sunak and whose father is the Indian tech billionaire Narayana Murthy, says. Mr. Starmer said that if Mr. Sunak becomes the next Tory leader, the wealth of Mr. Sunak and his wife would be at the center of Labour's attacks on him.
Mr. Johnson hasn't backed any of the candidates because he thinks it could hurt their chances if he did. But in a lively conversation with Mr. Starmer, he said that any of them could "wipe the floor" with the Labour leader, who he called "Captain Crash-a-Roony Snooze Fest."