10 June 2019 | UK NEWS
The Conservative Party leadership contest has officially begun, with 10 contenders at the outset following Sam Gyimah’s withdrawal earlier today. The full list of candidates is as follows:
Boris Johnson (former Foreign Secretary) | Dominic Raab (former Brexit Secretary) | Jeremy Hunt (Foreign Secretary) | Michael Gove (Environment Secretary) | Matt Hancock (Health Secretary) | Mark Harper (former Chief Whip) | Esther McVey (former Work & Pensions Secretary) | Sajid Javid (Home Secretary) | Andrea Leadsom (former Leader of the Commons) | Rory Stewart (International Development Secretary)
Several of the candidates have given press conferences launching their leadership bids today – further coverage of this will be posted tomorrow. Candidates will be eliminated in a series of ballots, with the first to be held this coming Thursday. Any candidate with fewer than 17 votes (or 5% of the Parliamentary party) will be automatically eliminated. The first hustings featuring all candidates before Conservative MPs, hosted by the 1922 Committee, will begin on Tuesday from 3-7pm, continuing on Wednesday from 4-6pm. No members of the press may attend.
It follows an interesting series of revelations as ConservativeHome posed the famed question to all the leadership candidates in a series of interviews: “What is the naughtiest thing you have ever done?” Several of the leadership candidates confessed to having tried illicit substances earlier in their lives, as reported by Guido Fawkes.
Meanwhile, in the Labour Party, The Guardian reports that tonight’s meeting of the PLP was Jeremy Corbyn’s “worst meeting as leader”. It cites reports that Mr Corbyn did not “seem to acknowledge that there were difficulties”, including around Brexit, anti-Semitism and sexual harassment claims.
Elsewhere, following an announcement from the BBC that free TV licenses for over-75s are now to be scrapped, The Telegraph carries a short piece questioning the wider sustainability of the license fee model, given that overall consumption of BBC content is falling.
