Rishi Sunak inches one step closer to creating history as Boris Johnson drops out of UK PM race
With Boris Johnson dropping out of the race to be the next UK PM, Rishi Sunak is now one step closer to victory in the United Kingdom.
Though he lost out to Liz Truss in the last rounds of voting, the sun seems to be shining on Indian-origin politician Rishi Sunak in the race to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom as Boris Johnson has announced that he will be dropping out of the competition.
Just ahead of the last day to file the nominations for the UK PM race in the country, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that he will be pulling out of the elections as he is not able to drum up enough support to beat Sunak in the elections.
In an official statement, Boris Johnson said, “There is a very good chance that I would be successful in the election with Conservative Party members - and that I could indeed be back in Downing Street on Friday.”
The former prime minister further added, “But in the course of the last days I have sadly come to the conclusion that this would simply not be the right thing to do. You can't govern effectively unless you have a united party in parliament.”
Johnson, who never formally announced his bid to return to Downing Street, has spent the weekend trying to persuade Conservative lawmakers to back him and said on Sunday that he had the support of 102 of them.
He needed the backing of 100 by Monday to proceed to the next stage, which would have seen him going head-to-head against Sunak in a vote by the Conservative Party's 170,000 members.
Sunak, whose resignation as finance minister in July helped precipitate Johnson's fall, had cleared the threshold of 100 lawmakers needed to progress to the next stage, securing 142 declared supporters on Sunday, according to Sky News.
As of now, Rishi Sunak seems to be the only official candidate in the race to be the next United Kingdom PM, with the last day to file nominations being October 24. If Sunak is appointed to the post, he will create history by being the first-ever Indian-origin Prime Minister of Britain.
(With Reuters inputs)