UK plays Kaun Banega Agla PM with Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat

United Kingdom (UK) will elect its fourth Prime Minister (PM) after PM Boris Johnson resigned as the leader of Britain's Conservative party after months of ethics scandals and revolt from within the party.

However, Britain's PM is not elected by country's 68 million people but by lawmakers of the political party which has the highest number of lawmakers. In this case, it happens to be Johnson's Conservative Party which had a landslide victory in 2019.

Candidates putting themselves forward for the leadership must be nominated by two other Conservative lawmakers.Conservative lawmakers will then hold several rounds of votes. Each time they are asked to vote for their favoured candidate in a secret ballot, and the person with the fewest votes is eliminated, reported Reuters.

This process is repeated until there are two candidates remaining. The final two candidates will be put to a vote of the full party membership across the country, which is about 180,000 people, by postal ballot.

The three names leading the race are Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat.

1. RISHI SUNAK

The former Chancellor or the Finance Minister, is the front-runner for the PM post. Sunak, 42, along with Sajid Javid was among the cabinet ministers who had tendered his resignation on July 5.

In a campaign video, Sunak promised that he would rebuild the economy and also restore the trust of his Conservative Party. 

He became popular when he introduced mass employee retention programs that prevented mass unemployment during Covid-19. He was appreciated widely for that.

2. PENNY MORDAUNT

She is the second most popular contender for PM post after Rishi Sunak, according to YouGov poll. A supporter of Brexit, Mordaunt, 49, is a junior trade minister in the cabinet. Though she hasn’t entered the race officially, she is considered a dark horse to lead the Conservative Party.

3. TOM TUGENDHAT

A former soldier who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, announced his bid for leadership on the Daily Telegraph. He said he would provide a “clean start”. Tugendhat is the chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons.

He has been a Boris Johnson critic and had voted against Brexit when Johnson campaigned for it. He has also never served in the government.