Boris Johnson to be British prime minister after winning Conservative Party leadership contest

Source: Washington Examiner | July 23, 2019 | Joel Gehrke

Boris Johnson has completed his march to the British prime minister’s office in 10 Downing Street, defeating rival Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt in the Conservative Party leadership election.

His victory was overwhelming, with 92,153 votes to Hunt’s 46,656 out of an eligible electorate of 159,320 party members and an 87% turnout.

Johnson, 55, member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, is a former mayor of London and biographer of Winston Churchill who was educated at Eton and Oxford. He won 160 votes out of 313 Conservatives MPs against Hunt’s 77 and Michael Gove’s 75. That led to a run-off this week in which Johnson secured a majority of 160,000 party members in a postal ballot.

“It’s right and timely that they have someone who supported Brexit actually becoming prime minister,” Luke Coffey, a Heritage Foundation analyst and U.S. Army veteran who was a British defense ministry adviser, told the Washington Examiner.

New York-born Johnson, a former journalist, arrives at Downing Street with an eye on the Oct. 31 Brexit deadline to lead the United Kingdom out of the European Union. That leaves him just more than two months to resolve one of the most divisive controversies to rock London and the broader network of Western allies in decades.

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