Rishi Sunak to meet King Charles on Tuesday morning before taking over as prime minister The government has announced a timetable for Tuesday, where Rishi Sunak will travel to Buckingham Palace and meet King Charles. Sunak will meet the monarch after Liz Truss has chaired a final meeting of her cabinet at 9am, after which she will make a speech outside Downing Street. She will then go to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the King. Afterwards, Sunak will go and meet the King, where he will be asked to form a government. The new prime minister will then give a speech outside Number 10 at about 11.35am. Summary Here’s a roundup of today’s news, as Rishi Sunak wins the Conservative party leadership, as the only candidate after Penny Mordaunt decided not to run. Rishi Sunak has become Conservative party leader, after the result of the first round of the leadership contest was announced on Monday afternoon. In a speech Sunak told his party it must “unite or die” and in a stilted TV address he said Britain faces “a profound economic challenge”. Penny Mordaunt announced she would withdraw from the race, minutes before the 1922 committee announcement. Allies have shown evidence she was less than 10 MPs away from making the 100 MP threshold. Sunak will meet King Charles at the palace on Tuesday where he will be asked to form a government, and become prime minister. Sunak will give a speech outside Downing Street before midday. Liz Truss will chair her final cabinet at 9am before going to the palace to resign. YouGov has released new polling suggesting that Keir Starmer is seen as likely to make the best prime minister by voters in three times as many constituencies as Sunak. That’s all for today. Thanks for following along. Despite having no popular mandate, he did little to reassure people who are worried sick about rising costs or lengthening NHS waits. The emergency is real. Yet Mr Sunak seems intent on turning off household support for energy bills next April. He plainly thinks that meeting an arbitrary target of reducing national debt is more important than saving people from penury. Guardian sketchwriter John Crace has written this on the day’s events which he’s described as a “second coming for Sunak, the silent messiah”. It all panned out about as well as the Conservative party could have hoped. A new leader – the right leader, as far as MPs were concerned – elected in a matter of days. No general election. Heaven forbid. A failed state couldn’t be doing with that level of democracy. Never trust the people you’re intending to govern. Not even a parochial, controlled election of the Conservative gerontocratic membership. That really hadn’t worked out so well the last time they had tried that. No. Now was the time to reduce the electorate from 180,000 down to 357 MPs. That was the way to govern the UK. Men and women who could be trusted to put the interests of themselves and their party ahead of those of the country. A higher calling than simple patriotism. Mind you, it hadn’t been entirely plain sailing. Boris Johnson had flown back from his holidays – how thoughtful of him to take a break when the rest of parliament was not on recess – to announce that he thought he had served his time in the wilderness. In his mind, a couple of months hard vacation were more than long enough punishment for criminality, serial lying and general incompetence. To be fair it had also been long enough for 102 MPs. Enough to have secured the Convict a place on the ballot. That’s if you trust him not to have double-counted at least 20 of his supporters. Not many people did. Most just thought he hadn’t got the numbers and was trying to put the most positive spin on a failed comeback. The chancellor Jeremy Hunt has congratulated Rishi Sunak on becoming prime minister. Sunak has not yet announced whether he will keep Hunt in post, ahead of a fiscal statement that is scheduled to take place on 31 October. Hunt tweeted: “This is a time for honesty about the huge economic challenges we face, and courage in addressing them. We have a PM who can be trusted to do just that - and give us all confidence in the huge potential of our country.” New polling by YouGov has found that a majority of people believe Rishi Sunak should call an early general election. The results, published hours after it was confirmed that Sunak would be the next prime minister, found 56% of people said they thought he should, against 29% who thought otherwise. YouGov also found that there were mixed feelings about Sunak taking over as prime minister – 41% of people fell under the category of “disappointed” against 38% of those who were “pleased”. The news that Rishi Sunak will become prime minister tomorrow when he meets the King means that Liz Truss has done her final prime minister’s questions. There was thought that she might have hung on until Wednesday lunchtime, to answer questions from the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, for the final time. Outgoing leaders have previously used final sessions at the dispatch box as a valedictory send off, from Margaret Thatcher retorting “I’m enjoying this” in response to a quip from Dennis Skinner about whether she would become the governor of the new European Central Bank, to Boris Johnson’s “hasta la vista, baby” in July. Instead Truss’s last time addressing the commons as prime minister will be her insisting she was a “fighter, not a quitter”, before standing down 24 hours later. Rishi Sunak to meet King Charles on Tuesday morning before taking over as prime minister The government has announced a timetable for Tuesday, where Rishi Sunak will travel to Buckingham Palace and meet King Charles. Sunak will meet the monarch after Liz Truss has chaired a final meeting of her cabinet at 9am, after which she will make a speech outside Downing Street. She will then go to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the King. Afterwards, Sunak will go and meet the King, where he will be asked to form a government. The new prime minister will then give a speech outside Number 10 at about 11.35am. Former Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith has said that Boris Johnson was “begging for votes” over the weekend, having returned from the Dominican Republic to try and put together a leadership campaign. Speaking to Andrew Marr on LBC, he said: “I think the problem when Boris came over was: one, Boris was completely unexpectedly having to do this. He made no plans. He had no team. He kind of expected I think when he arrived that there would be at least 150 people claiming him. And this would grow to the majority that didn’t happen, suddenly they find themselves struggling and begging people for votes. “That was demeaning, really. And then when Rishi and the other said, no, the only deal we do with you is if you were serving us, not the other way around, and that cost didn’t suit him.” This is Harry Taylor taking over from Andrew Sparrow for the rest of this evening. Here are tweets from two academics on the prospects of the Conservative party under Rishi Sunak. This is from Prof Tim Bale, who has written several books about the modern Conservative party. And this is from Prof Matt Goodwin, who has written books mostly on populism and the radical right. That’s all from me for today. My colleague Harry Taylor is taking over now. This is from Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, on Rishi Sunak’s election as Tory leader and next PM. Mark Drakeford has also offered “llongyfarchiadau” (congratulations) to Rishi Sunak. Drakeford says he hopes that Rishi Sunak will work “constructively” with his administration. Relations cannot be much worse than they were under Liz Truss. During the Tory leadership contest in the summer Truss said Nicola Sturgeon was an “attention seeker” who was best ignored, and once she became PM Truss acted her on own advice, declining to make the usual courtesy calls to the Scottish and Welsh first ministers on her appointment. YouGov has released new polling suggesting that Keir Starmer is seen as likely to make the best prime minister by voters in three times as many constituencies as Rishi Sunak. Overall, 38% of respondents said Starmer would be best, while 29% said Sunak would be best. And the seat by seat figures (produced by an MRP [multilevel regression and post-stratification] analysis) suggest that Sunak was not ahead in any of the “red wall” Labour seats won by Boris Johnson at the last election. And this is from Leo Varadkar, the Irish deputy PM. Varadkar, who was taoiseach (Irish PM) for three years, and who is due to take up the post again as part of a coalition deal, is of Indian heritage himself.