Tom Tugendhat out of the race as Sunak still leads field Tom Tugendhat has been knocked out of the Tory leadership race after only receiving 31 votes in the third round of the vote. Graham Brady said 357 votes were cast in the third round of the vote. The results for the other candidates are as follows: Kemi Badenoch received 58, Penny Mordaunt got 82, Rishi Sunak got 115 and Liz Truss received 71. Evening summary Here’s a round up of the key developments from today: Tom Tugendhat has been knocked out of the Tory leadership race after only receiving 31 votes in the third round of the vote. The results for the other candidates are as follows: Kemi Badenoch received 58, Penny Mordaunt got 82, Rishi Sunak got 115 and Liz Truss received 71. The government has won tonight’s vote of confidence with 349 in support. Meanwhile 248 MPs voted that they don’t have confidence in the government. This result was expected given had Conservative MPs voted that they had no confidence in the government, an early election would likely had to have been called. Boris Johnson has defended his three years in power during a combative speech that hinted at a “deep state” plot to drag the UK back into the EU when he leaves office. He said some people think his departure will prove the end of Brexit. He urges his party to prove them wrong. Although Keir Starmer’s speech was largely focused on Boris Johnson, as well as attacking the prime minister, he also attacked the Conservatives for electing him in the first place, and for sustaining him in office for so long. Labour fears that, once Johnson leaves, the Conservatives will recover some of their popularity. For Starmer it is important to ensure that opprobrium attached to Johnson sticks to the Tories too Sky News announced it cancelled the Tory leadership debate planned for tomorrow night after Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss said they would not take part. Conservative MPs are said to be concerned about the damage the debates are doing to the image of the Conservative party, exposing disagreements and splits within the party, Sky News said. The government’s emergency committee, Cobra, has been meeting to discuss how to handle the heatwave, but Boris Johnson has not been chairing those meetings himself. At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson defended his decision to leave it to a junior colleague. One of the biggest shocks of the day was Kemi Badenoch, the former equalities minister, firmly, for the first time, committing to the UKs climate commitments and saying she would not row back on net zero. She previously disparaged the target, causing alarm among green Tories. Pat McFadden, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, has written to Nadhim Zahawi, challenging him to provide more clarity about his tax and financial affairs. On Wednesday next week Guardian Live is hosting a discussion on who will be the next Conservative leader. The panel includes my colleagues Jonathan Freedland and John Crace, and Salma Shah, a former special adviser to Sajid Javid. Full details of the event, and how to get tickets, are available here. We are closing this liveblog now. Thanks so much for joining us. The government wins confidence vote The government has won tonight’s vote of confidence with 349 in support. Meanwhile 248 MPs voted that they don’t have confidence in the government. This result was expected given had Conservative MPs voted that they had no confidence in the government, an early election would likely had to have been called. Supporters of Liz Truss have said her key rival, Penny Mordaunt, has “topped out” of backers, as the foreign secretary gained ground in the fight for second place in the Conservative leadership contest. Mordaunt lost a vote in the latest ballot of Tory MPs’ – a key sign her campaign had stalled after a weekend of bruising attacks – but remained behind frontrunner Rishi Sunak. But the pressure is still on Truss, who gained just seven MP backers, less than the fourth-placed Kemi Badenoch, who received nine new supporters. Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the foreign affairs select committee, was knocked out of the race. James Cleverly, the education secretary, said Truss had shown during the leadership debates that she was ready for the job. “This is about day one competence, she is showing she has always had the best depth and breadth of experience,” he added. The remaining leadership hopefuls will now be hoping to pick off Tugendhat’s 31 supporters. A Truss backer said that Mordaunt’s support was strong, but they believed she and Badenoch would not ultimately be able to overcome their relative lack of experience to win the chance to face off with Sunak in the final two. The MPs in the commons are now voting on the motion of confidence in the government. It is expected that most Tory MPs will vote that they do have confidence in the government despite many of them resigning from government because they didn’t have confidence in Boris Johnson less than two weeks ago. If they don’t, there would probably have to be an early general election, which the Conservatives do not want. In a highly unusual move, No 10 actually called the vote of confidence in itself after it rejected a Labour motion that singled out Johnson. Fascism does not always “arrive wearing jackboots”, but can come “more subtly”, Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has said during the Vote of Confidence debate. The MP told the commons: It would be easy to dismiss this government as simply the incompetents that they are. But that would be wrong because the popular style of politics they’ve inflicted on this country is deeply dangerous. The risk of a frightening descent into what the honourable member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) bravely and correctly called out in May: fascism. As she said back then, fascism doesn’t always arrive wearing jackboots, it can come knocking more subtly than that. Well, students of fascism have helpfully suggested some of its signs: disinformation, misogyny, disdain for intellectuals, social conformity, suppression of trade unions, threats to human rights, the creation and abuse of hate groups, the rise of militarisation and, of course, racism, which is at the heart of fascism. Do any of these sounds familiar? There is a pattern here, if only we are prepared to see it. We like to tell ourselves that we live in a mature democracy. Yet this populist government has deliberately set out to weaken the very institutions that define a liberal democracy. Penny Mordaunt, who came second in the vote but lost one of her votes, said: My vote is steady and I’m grateful to my colleagues for all their support and thrilled to be in second place once more. MPs know that I’m a strong candidate, running a truly clean campaign and putting forward a positive vision for the party and our country. Mordaunt, who will be hoping to benefit from Tom Tugendhat being eliminated said he was a friend and colleague who she has admired for years and said: I know that we are both committed to a clean start for our party and I believe he is one of the strongest assets on the Conservative green benches. It was an honour to stand alongside him in this contest. Following the results of tonight’s Tory leadership vote, Kemi Badenoch tweeted that it was “all to play for” and that she was “in it to win”. She said: Continued momentum, closing the gap, I am the only change candidate left in the race. A source for Badenoch’s campaign, meanwhile, told the PA news agency: Kemi is pleased to have taken it to the next vote. She has momentum over both Mordaunt and Truss. It’s all to play for and Kemi is in it to win. She wants to deliver change and is the only candidate in the race capable of delivering it. A source for Rishi Sunak’s campaign said the former chancellor had achieved a “good result” in the latest leadership ballot. They told the PA news agency: A good result for Rishi after two TV debates and a consistent and sensible message. MPs are recognising that Rishi has the best experience and plans to deal with the current economic situation. Rishi will rebuild our economy by gripping inflation and getting our economy growing quickly again. Full report: Tom Tugendhat knocked out as Tory leadership race goes down to final four Aubrey Allegretti Tom Tugendhat has been knocked out of the race to become Britain’s next prime minister, with four candidates left in the Conservative leadership race. Rishi Sunak remains the frontrunner, with two more votes due to be held by Tory MPs on Tuesday and Wednesday this week to decide the final two candidates. Sunak gained 14 supporters from the last ballot to put him on a total of 115, trailed by Penny Mordaunt, who lost one, giving her 82. Liz Truss remained in third place, picking up seven supporters to put her on 71, while Kemi Badenoch came fourth with an extra nine supporters, giving her 58. Tugendhat’s allies had been expecting him to poll last in the vote, briefing hours before that it was “ours to lose”. They said they were unlikely to have inherited many supporters from the previous candidate to be knocked out, Suella Braverman. Though Sunak retained his lead, those MPs who backed Tugendhat and were urged by the former chancellor’s team to back him instead, expressed surprise that he was still scrambling to shore up supporters given he seemed all but certain to make the final two. As the race narrowed further, wavering MPs said the final few rounds were likely to be dictated by the fight between the “Anyone but Sunak” and “Anyone but Truss” factions in a bid to keep one of them out of the final two. After his elimination from the Tory leadership contest, Tom Tugendhat said he will listen to what other candidates have to say before deciding who to support. In a video posted to Twitter, Tugendhat said: We fought for a clean start because we know that that’s what the country is crying out for. We’ve seen that in the response to the two debates, we’ve seen that in the engagement we’ve had from people. Now I’m going to be with you, of course, over the next two years, fighting in the council elections and then fighting again in the general election and then long into the future, because we need to make sure that our party, the Conservative Party, is able to deliver a clean start for the country and for ourselves. But please, I’m not going to be talking about any candidates at the moment, I’ll listen to what they have to say and I’ll be making my judgment later. Tom Tugendhat, who has become the latest candidate to be eliminated from the Tory leadership contest, tweeted that he was “immensely proud of the positive vision” he and his team put forward during the campaign. Here’s a breakdown of the losses and gains during that vote. Rishi Sunak gained 14 votes while Kemi Badenoch gained nine and Liz Truss gained seven. Meanwhile, Penny Mordaunt and Tom Tugendhat both dropped a vote. Sunak is only five votes off of a guaranteed place in the postal vote to the wider Conservative party. Truss will be disappointed to have only taken seven of Suella Braverman’s votes – especially as Braverman publicly backed Truss after being eliminated– while Badenoch will be pleased to be gaining on her rival on the right. Mordaunt will also be very disappointed that her momentum has stalled. Tom Tugendhat out of the race as Sunak still leads field Tom Tugendhat has been knocked out of the Tory leadership race after only receiving 31 votes in the third round of the vote. Graham Brady said 357 votes were cast in the third round of the vote. The results for the other candidates are as follows: Kemi Badenoch received 58, Penny Mordaunt got 82, Rishi Sunak got 115 and Liz Truss received 71. The results of the third round of the leadership ballot is about to be announced. You can watch the livestream of the results above. It’s widely predicated that Tom Tugendhat will be knocked out during this round and may already have lost votes to Penny Mordaunt during this vote. Rishi Sunak is not expecting to make much of a gain from the last vote but Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch will be hoping for some momentum as they will be hoping to pick up votes from Suella Braverman. Sally-Ann Hart, Conservative MP for Hastings and Rye, said Labour was panicking at the idea of a new Conservative leader. She said: With this prime minister gone, what will the opposition do? We can feel their panic from across the floor: their hate fuelled moralistic posturing has made them all vulnerable. On this side of the house we keep calm and carry on. Labour MP Jess Philips made a good point during her speech: She said: It is unusual being sat here listening to all this praise for their prime minister when they’ve just got rid of him. She went on to speak passionately about the government’s record on handling sexual assault and harassment allegations. She said: When the Labour party was having a leadership election a contest every candidate was rightly asked what they would to deal with anti-semitism…I’d like to know what Rishi Sunak did when Chris Pincher was appointed deputy chief whip. What Liz Truss did? I want to know what all the candidates did. And I want to know what the Conservative party is going to do to deal with its institutional inability to deal with complaints about sexual harassment. A Tory MP was told he should be ashamed of the government’s record on LGBT rights during the vote of confidence debate in the Commons – which led to a heated exchange across the Commons chamber. In his speech, Chris Bryant told the Commons: No I don’t have confidence in this government because they are obsessed with all the wrong things. They spend more time and energy protecting statues than protecting women from domestic abuse. They deliberately drive wedges between people over gender identity and trans rights and ignore the fact that their own equalities minister resigned because he thought the Government was creating a hostile environment for LGBT people. Bryant then pointed at Tory MP Chris Clarkson, who had just finished a speech giving his backing to the government and who is gay, and said: Which is why he should be ashamed to defend this government. Raising a point of order, Clarkson asked whether pointing at him was in order, but Deputy Speaker Dame Rosie Winterton said it would have been “appropriate” for the Conservative MP to try to intervene in Bryant’s speech instead. Bryant and Clarkson could later be seen speaking to each other in angry but hushed tones across the Commons chamber, each telling the other they should be ashamed. Labour MP Diana Johnson has tweeted to say the vote of confidence debate is “one of the nastiest” she has ever experienced. SNP MP Stewart McDonald told the Commons: We don’t have a government, it’s a government in name only, it’s essentially now a form of organised Tory hooliganism that squats in these offices of state, that squats in these departments and squats most of all in Downing Street. Earlier, Conservative MP Sir Bill Cash shouted “don’t you dare speak like that” after an apparent heckle in response to him raising Johnson’s experiences with Covid. He told the Commons: On the handling of Covid, from which he nearly died himself, and despite which – don’t you dare speak like that – with courage and resilience he battled through. It was not clear in the chamber what was shouted from the opposition benches, with Cash opting to continue his speech in defence of Johnson.