Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak will go head-to-head in a live TV debate after a weekend that saw allies of the two Tory leadership hopefuls trade increasingly personal attacks.
The battle to become the next prime minister heated up as the two rival camps clashed over immigration, China and tax . The Foreign Secretary and former Chancellor will spend the day engaging in final preparations ahead of their first showdown on Monday evening.
With postal ballots set to arrive on Tory members’ doorsteps by August 5, Sunak faces pressure to use the BBC debate to make an early breakthrough. The eventual winner and next Prime Minister will be decided by a vote amongst approximately 180,000 Tory Party members and is set to be announced on September 6.
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The first head-to-head debates will be broadcast live on BBC One at 9pm on Monday (25 July). The studio audience will be made up entirely of people who voted Conservative at the last general election.
Sophie Raworth will host the debate in Stoke-on-Trent, with the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason and economics editor Faisal Islam offering analysis and some follow-up questions. The constituencies of Stoke-on-Trent North and Central are a key political battleground for the Tories, as they flipped from Labour to Conservative in 2019.
Rishi Sunak resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer on July 5 in protest at Boris Johnson’s leadership, followed by swathes of Tory MPs, eventually forcing the Prime Minister’s hand in stepping down as leader of the Conservative Party. Although he comfortably won the leadership race among Tory MPs, bookmakers have made Ms Truss favourite after a series of opinion polls and surveys put her firmly ahead with Conservative members.
Mr Sunak will meet Tory members at low-key events on Monday and will use the debate to ”make a positive case for Britain’s future, debating all kinds of policy areas, including those he has already set out detailed plans for over the last few days, including immigration, Covid backlogs and foreign policy,” a campaign insider said.
Polls and surveys of Tory members currently put Truss well ahead in the competition. A YouGov poll carried out on 20-21 July showed 31% of the membership intend to vote for Sunak, while 49% intend to vote for Truss.
A further 15% have not yet decided how they will vote, and 6%said they will abstain. Surveys by independent conservative news and analysis site, ConservativeHome, also show Truss as having a considerable lead over Sunak.
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