Foreign Secretary Liz Truss will battle it out against former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak to replace Boris Johnson and become the Conservative party leader and next prime minister of the United Kingdom.
They will battle it out over the next five weeks to replace Boris Johnson as Tory party leader.
Their fate will be decided by Conservative Party members, with the winner to be revealed on September 5.
The final two were chosen by Conservative MPs in a final leadership run-off vote which saw Sunak top the results with 137 and Ms Truss second with 113 votes.
Third candidate Penny Mordaunt received the lowest number of votes at 105 and was ousted from the contest.
Ms Truss and Sunak will now put their cases forward to the Conservative Party’s 200,000-strong membership, who will vote to decide who becomes the new leader on September 5.
The leadership change comes after Johnson resigned as leader of the Conservative Party in early July, following a string of scandals that embroiled him and his government.
Johnson will remain as prime minister until a new leader is chosen.
The new prime minister will face the cost of living crisis, inflation at a 40-year high, increased industrial action, and will need to navigate the Ukraine crisis where the UK has been taking a leading role in rebuking Russia.
Ms Truss thanked Conservative MPs for “putting your trust in me” and said she was “ready to hit the ground from day one” in an initial Twitter post that was deleted shortly after and reposted to read “hit the ground running from day one”.
Sunak posted a video message to his Twitter page, saying he was “grateful that my colleagues have put their trust in me today”.
“I will work night and day to deliver our message around the country,” he said.
Both are senior figures in the party and pulled out of a third televised debate last Monday after previous debates saw brutal exchanges where candidates attacked each other’s credentials to lead and were seen as detrimental to the party.
Ms Truss, 46, is viewed as a Boris Johnson loyalist, having stayed in the Prime Minister’s cabinet while other senior ministers deserted him earlier this month, and has been backed by the Conservative Party’s right faction.
She is seen as the frontrunner in the leadership contest, with polling of Conservative members giving her a 20-point lead over her rival.
On the other hand, Sunak, 42, has been blamed by some quarters for helping bring down Johnson’s premiership when he resigned from his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer two days before Johnson eventually quit.
At the end of last year Sunak was tipped as the top candidate to succeed Johnson, but his standing took a hit after it was revealed his billionaire-heiress wife had not been paying tax in the UK on foreign earnings.
He was also caught up in the ‘Partygate’ scandal, which saw him receive a fine from police for breeching coronavirus restrictions.