Rishi Sunak has been confirmed next Conservative party leader and prime minister of the UK, after Penny Mordaunt pulled out of the leadership race. 
The news arrived at 2pm today and put an end to a flash leadership campaign in which Sunak, Mordaunt and former prime minister Boris Johnson attempted to secure the support of at least 100 Conservative MPs.
The leadership race was started on 20 October by Liz Truss’s resignation, following chaos in Westminster around a motion on fracking and uncertainty as to whether it was being treated as a confidence motion or not. The handling of the matter triggered chief and deputy whip Wendy Morton’s and Craig Whittaker’s resignations.
On the same day, Suella Braverman also quit, justifying her move with a technical infringement from her side.
This was the straw which concluded Truss’s 44-days tenure and set off yet another Conservative party leadership campaign.
Boris Johnson, who cut a holiday in the Dominican Republic short, returned to the UK only to decide that the time wasn’t right for his comeback, claiming the party remained split on his candidature.
Mordaunt pulled out of the race last minute after failing to gather the necessary 100 nominations, effectively coronating Sunak next prime minister.
Former chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunak now faces a difficult tenure and has to navigate the country through a profound economic crisis.
His views on the economy had lost against Truss’s during the previous leadership contest, but turned out to be more credible to the markets than Truss’s, under whose leadership chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget caused a tantrum in the market and crashed the pound.
Sunak’s criticised Truss’s tax cuts and promised a “responsible” way forward, meaning that that any tax cuts (including to VAT on household fuel bills and income) would only come once inflation is under control.
Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said that Sunak the prime minister is likely to take a very different approach to Sunak the chancellor, who supported the UK through the pandemic with big spending measures such as the furlough scheme and Eat Out to Help Out.
‘’Gone are the days when Rishi Sunak was prepared to open the government coffers up to see the UK through a crisis. The pandemic spending spree is well and truly over and the former chancellor will take the top job in the guise of a strict and austere headteacher,” she said.
“He will be determined not to see the bond market run amok again, threatening the country’s financial stability. He will be revelling in the fact that his curriculum of higher taxes and curtailed spending, which he preached on the campaign trail, is already being followed.
“However, it’s likely he will take an even harder line now on government budgets, given the punishment threatened to be handed out again comes in the form of much higher government borrowing costs. He will also want to show he is co-operating with the Bank of England by being ultra conservative fiscally in a bid to tame high inflation.”