Mr Cameron said the Home Secretary would take over from him on Wednesday after he has taken his last Prime Minister’s Questions and offered his resignation to the Queen.
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“I firmly believe that we all should now unite behind Theresa May as being the only candidate for the leader of the party”.
“We will have a new prime minister in that building behind me by Wednesday evening”, Cameron said in a brief statement outside the leader’s official London residence.
Leadsom’s withdrawal means all the top Brexit campaigners – Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Leadsom and outgoing UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage – have now stepped back from leadership roles.
Britain’s Theresa May has been confirmed as the victor of the ruling Conservatives’ leadership contest and will be installed as prime minister shortly, the chairman of a party committee running the contest said on Monday.
Cameron says it’s clear May has “the overwhelming support” of Conservative lawmakers.
“[May’s] ideally placed to implement Brexit on the best possible terms for the British people”, Leadsom said.
The post David Cameron to resign as United Kingdom prime minister on Wednesday appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
Around lunchtime, Mrs Leadsom, 53, said she was pulling out of the leadership contest shortly after apologising to her rival after appearing to suggest the fact that she was a mother gave her the edge over the childless Mrs May.
Labour lawmaker Angela Eagle was Monday launching an attempt to unseat party leader Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran left-winger who has a strong base of support among Labour members but little backing from the party’s 229 lawmakers.
Leadsom has children; May does not.
Cameron announced he would resign by October following the June 23 referendum, in which the country voted to pull out of the European Union.
Some 329 Conservative members of Parliament voted to whittle down five candidates to two for their party’s leadership, but it seems the 150,000 party members who were supposed to have the final say will have no input in it at all.
I don’t know if she means this or not.
“I think today’s events have been a little unexpected but I would pay tribute to Andrea Leadsom for putting the country’s interests and the need for strong leadership at a hard time ahead of her own interests”.
The shock referendum result has plunged Britain’s two main parties, which have dominated politics for almost a century, into a state of upheaval.
Leadsom’s rivals said both her comments and her subsequent flip-flopping showed the junior energy minister doesn’t have the experience under pressure required to be prime minister. Her allies accused May supporters of attempting to undermine Leadsom.
“We do have this remarkable situation in British politics now where the people who led a fantastically successful campaign that got 17 million people to vote to leave the European Union have all but disappeared”, said Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics at King’s College London.
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Eagle, who is from Labour’s “soft” left and was the first female MP to enter a civil partnership with her female partner in 2008, said Britain faced “dangerous times”.
