London, Thanasis Gavos

Six are the deputies of the Conservative Party in Britain who have declared their candidacy to succeed Rishi Sunak, who has announced he will step down as party leader following his election defeat earlier this month.

Kemi Badenoch, previously Minister for Business and Trade and now Shadow Minister for Housing and Communities, was the latest candidate.

The Nigerian-born 44-year-old politician comes from the right wing of the party and was early seen by many as a future Tory leader.

Announcing the decision to contest the party’s power, he wrote in an op-ed in The Times that to win back voters everyone in the Conservative Party needed to know “who we are and what we want to be”.

A little earlier, another member of parliament from the right wing of the Conservatives had announced her candidacy, the 52-year-old former interior minister Priti Patel of Indian origin.

The third right-wing Tory leader vying for the leadership is former Under Secretary of State for Immigration Robert Jenrick, 42.

Perhaps the most well-known and most controversial Conservative far-right MP Suella Braverman, who was expected to run for the party leadership again, has finally announced in an article in the Telegraph that she will not be running.

“It makes no sense, for better or worse, for someone like me to stand for the Tory leadership when most MPs disagree with my diagnosis of what went wrong and how to fix it,” Ms Braverman wrote.

She attributed the election defeat to backlash on immigration, taxation and “transgender ideology” and commented that some in the party had described her as “crazy, evil and dangerous”.

The remaining three leadership contenders will be representatives of the more moderate wing of the Conservatives: former Home Secretary and ex-Foreign Secretary James Cleverley, 52, former Under Secretary of State for Security Tom Tugendhat, 51, and Mel Stride, 62, Work and Pensions Secretary in Sunak government.

Nominations close on Monday evening and the internal party process will nominate Rishi Sunak’s successor on November 2.