The victor will become the UK’s second female prime minister.
Advertisement
The comments were denounced by many Conservative MPs and May supporters, who used words like “vile”, “divisive”, “insulting” and “embarrassing” to describe them.
Mrs Trevelyan had been backing Michael Gove, the justice secretary, until he was eliminated from the Conservative leadership contest in a vote of the party’s MPs.
Mr Crabb made a decision to abandon his pursuit of Number 10 to support Mrs May earlier this week, after finishing fourth from an initial five candidates in the first round of voting which saw Liam Fox eliminated.
Responding, Mrs May urged Mrs Leadsom to back a “clean campaign pledge”.
“Andrea Leadsom is undoubtedly the outsider, but she will play up her Brexit credentials”, said Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips on Thursday in Westminster.
But despite her strong lead in the vote of MPs, May is far from assured of winning the race for Downing Street. She has also faced scrutiny over her personal financial affairs for using offshore bank accounts to legally avoid tax as part of a property business she ran with her husband.
Tusk called Britain’s June 23 vote to leave the 28-nation bloc a “very sad thing” and said it was a “very serious mistake” of Britain’s political elite to call such a vote.
In the second round of voting by Tory MPs, Mrs May picked up 199 votes against Energy Minister Mrs Leadsom’s 84.
But there is concern that the party’s current timetable – which would see the new leader installed on September 9 after a vote by the 150,000 members – is too slow.
“She says that she wants to be able to guarantee them and see guarantees for Brits living overseas in the EU”.
“We’ve had a lot of sniping, a kind of real “black-ops” operation to denigrate her reputation”, Mr Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader who is backing Ms Leadsom’s campaign, said. “Hey, that’s pretty quirky for the Tory party”, Loughton added.
After winning the most votes from parliamentary colleagues, Mrs May said the United Kingdom needs “strong, proven” leadership to handle Brexit negotiations and unite the country.
“I pledge that I will support whoever wins, and I would expect all my colleagues to support whoever is the next leader of the Conservative Party”. I was pressed to say how my children had formed my views. But both have agreed that Britain will eventually leave the European Union, although they differ on when exactly that will happen (May says not before the end of the year, while Leadsom’s position is that “we need to get on with it”).
Advertisement
Widely portrayed in the media as an act of treachery, that may have damaged his own bid, along with past interviews in which he had said he was neither interested in the prime minister’s job nor well suited to it.
