Johnson and Hunt Go Head-to-Head in Race to Be Next U.K. Leader
Brexit’s public face, Boris Johnson, will fight former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt to become Britain’s next prime minister.
(Bloomberg) --
The public face of Brexit, Boris Johnson, will fight former remainer and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt to become Britain’s next prime minister in a critical contest for the country and the European Union.
The pair will spend the next month battling for votes among the 160,000 grassroots members of the U.K.’s ruling Conservative Party, after Environment Secretary Michael Gove was knocked out of the contest Thursday evening. The winner will be announced in late July.
The run-off comes after five rounds of voting among the party’s members of Parliament whittled down a field of 10 candidates last week to the final pair Thursday. Johnson won the votes of 160 of his colleagues, compared with Hunt’s 77. Gove scored 75.
Suspicions were raised of vote lending because Johnson increased his tally in the final round by just three, even though at least four MPs who had earlier supported Home Secretary Sajid Javid, said they would switch to Johnson.
Pivotal Moment
Asked whether there had been vote lending during the course of the week, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, a Hunt supporter, said, “Yes, I think there’s more churn than the average washing machine.”
A spokesman for Johnson’s team rejected suggestions of vote lending as “nonsense.”
Hunt supporters argued that if Gove made the run-off, the contest would become a Tory psychodrama, reminding voters how Gove stabbed Johnson in the back in the 2016 contest when he quit as his campaign manager to instead run against him.
The Tory leadership election is a pivotal moment for Britain. The winner will have the chance to re-shape the country’s politics, and could dramatically alter its exit from the EU, which is due to take place in four months’ time. For the EU, the prospect of a Johnson victory would be their worst nightmare.
Many European officials blame Johnson for Brexit -- he led the 2016 referendum Vote Leave campaign -- and regard him as a dishonest populist intent on wrecking the bloc.
“I’m deeply honored to have secured more than 50% of the vote in the final ballot,” Johnson, 55, tweeted. “Thank you to everyone for your support! I look forward to getting out across the U.K. and to set out my plan to deliver Brexit, unite our country, and create a brighter future for all of us.”
The contest follows Theresa May’s resignation as Conservative leader after her failure to get the Brexit deal she negotiated with the EU ratified in a divided British Parliament.
Without an automatic majority in the House of Commons, whoever leads the Conservatives next will find the parliamentary mathematics equally perilous. That has led some to suggest an election will follow, perhaps later this year.
Johnson said he’s determined to deliver Brexit by the deadline of Oct. 31. He said he would prefer to leave with no deal -- despite the economic damage it would cause -- than allow the divorce to be delayed again. This has made him the hero of the party’s hard-line euro-skeptics who refused to back May’s deal and want a quick, sharp split from the bloc.
Still, he softened his rhetoric in recent days, saying he would “make sure” the country leaves on “terms that protect the U.K. and protect the EU as well.” In a debate Tuesday he declined to guarantee the country would leave on Oct. 31.
Hunt, who voted to remain in the EU in 2016 but now says he backs Brexit, is open to delaying exit day if it helps deliver a deal and an orderly departure. But he, too, has said he would take a no-deal divorce over no Brexit at all.
The electorate who will choose the next Tory leader are the paid-up members of the Conservative Party. They are more euro-skeptic than the rest of the British population and recent surveys have suggested they overwhelmingly favor Johnson.
Bring Back Excitement
That makes Hunt, 52, the underdog in the final, decisive month of the contest. Over the coming four weeks, the two candidates will take part in more than 15 hustings events around the U.K., starting in Birmingham on Saturday afternoon.
Hunt’s pitch is as a pragmatic negotiator, with a background in business and diplomacy, who can successfully negotiate a better deal with the EU’s 27 other member countries. He has tried to characterize himself as the more “serious” candidate, compared to Johnson’s famously jokey and populist style.
Johnson is offering a different answer to Britain’s problems. He says he wants to revive an optimistic spirit in politics. In an interview with London’s Evening Standard newspaper on Thursday, he gave little detail about his plans for government beyond promising to get Brexit “over the line,’’ cut taxes, spend on infrastructure, and bring “excitement’’ back.
Both candidates are pledging to renegotiate the Brexit deal with the EU and get a better one before the deadline for leaving the bloc.
At an EU summit in Brussels on Thursday, leaders reiterated that the withdrawal agreement May negotiated last year will not be reopened, and their patience with Britain is wearing thin.
“While I have endless patience, some of my colleagues have lost patience, quite frankly, with the U.K.,” Irish premier Leo Varadkar said. “There is enormous hostility to any further extension.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Tim Ross in London at tross54@bloomberg.net;Jessica Shankleman in London at jshankleman@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Emma Ross-Thomas, Zoe Schneeweiss
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