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Former work and pensions secretary Mel Stride has been knocked out of the Conservative leadership contest, as ex-immigration minister Robert Jenrick topped the ballot in the second round.
Jenrick clinched 33 votes, while former business secretary Kemi Badenoch recorded 28 supporters in the ballot on Tuesday.
Former home secretary James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat, a former security minister, were tied on 21 votes. Stride gained the support of just 16 fellow Tory MPs.
The result marked a surge in votes for Jenrick, who picked up five backers since the last round, and Badenoch, who gained an extra six.
Tugendhat gained four more votes, while Cleverly’s performance was unchanged from the first round, sparking claims that his momentum has stalled.
All but two of the party’s 121 MPs — former prime minister and outgoing leader Rishi Sunak, and Tory chair Richard Fuller — voted in the ballot. Former home secretary Dame Priti Patel was knocked out in the first round last week.
The final four candidates will now take part in a “beauty contest” at the Conservative annual conference in Birmingham at the end of this month.
Wrangling has already erupted over the arrangements for addressing the party faithful, with proposals to restrict each candidate to a 10-minute speech on the main stage triggering a backlash from some of the contenders’ campaigns.
Senior Tories said a compromise had been struck in which they will each give 20-minute speeches, be interviewed on stage, and may take part in a collective question-and-answer session with the audience.
Another element of the conference proceedings that has been confirmed is a plan for party members to make speeches from the main stage for the first time in decades.
The move follows growing resentment among a portion of the Tory grassroots who complain they have been disenfranchised from key parts of the internal political process, including candidate selection and policy formation.
The field of four leadership candidates will be whittled down further by Tory MPs to three, then two, in back-to-back ballots on October 9 and 10. Party members will then vote in the run-off, with the victor announced on Saturday November 2.
Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 committee which is overseeing the contest, has faced calls to expedite the last phase to elect a new leader before the Budget on October 30, but he has so far resisted pressure.
After the second-round ballot Conservative MPs started to speculate about who Stride’s backers would turn to, arguing that Tugendhat or Cleverly — the two “One Nation” Tory centrists left in the contest — would be most likely to benefit.
Tory insiders theorise that there is likely to be one rightwing candidate who makes it into the final two — either Jenrick or Badenoch — against one centrist.
Labour said the contenders’ “failure to take responsibility for the mess they made” while the Conservatives were in government “demonstrates that none of these candidates are cut out for the job”.