Britain's leader's hopes jostle as Johnson digs for final weeks

A group of candidates to replace incumbent Prime Minister Boris Johnson began to take shape on Friday, even as some Conservative Party lawmakers pushed to have the scandal-ridden leader resign before his replacement was elected in the next two months.

Johnson announced his resignation on Thursday – a dizzying about-face after months of insisting he would remain in his post amid growing ethics scandals and mounting discontent conservatives.

He resigned as party leader with a statement to the nation outside 10 Downing St., but said he would remain as Prime Minister until that his successor be chosen by the party. The move did not sit well with some of his Tory colleagues, who fear Johnson lacks the power to hang on or that he could do anything wrong even as caretaker prime minister.

James Cleverly, appointed education secretary on Thursday after his predecessor left during a mass exodus of ministers, defended Johnson's decision to stay.

“He it is true that he has stepped down and it is right that he has put together a team to continue to govern while the selection process unfolds for his successor,” Cleverly told Sky News. we should do it, I think, pretty soon, pretty soon."

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Party officials must set the timetable for a leadership race on Monday, with the goal of having a winner by the end of the summer. The two-step process involves Conservative lawmakers voting to narrow the field of candidates to two, who will go to a ballot of all party members across the country.

Legislator Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the influential House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, became the second candidate to declare his candidacy, after Attorney General Suella Braverman. Former Health Secretary Sajid Javid and former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak - whose resignations this week helped unseat Johnson - are also likely candidates, alongside Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, the Secretary to Defense Ben Wallace and Transportation Secretary Grant Shapps.

Even as the candidates launch their campaigns, Johnson remains at the top of a caretaker administration made up of a dwindling group of loyalists alongside of ministers who have agreed to stay on to keep the government running.

Johnson has promised not to make major policy decisions in the time he has left, but many Tories say that a lame leader is the last thing the country needs amid Russia's war in Ukraine and a deepening cost of living crisis triggered by soaring food and energy prices .

Some are also suspicious of Johnson's intentions after a resignation speech in which he made it clear he did not want to leave, but that he had "failed to persuade my colleagues that 'it would be eccentric to change governments when we are doing so much and when we have such a broad mandate.

George Freeman, who quit as science minister on Thursday, said he was worried about a leadership election being held in "a feverish moment of madness in the midst of the summer, where we pick the wrong person in a hurry due to instability". ”

Some had been pushing for Johnson to relent and let Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab take over as temporary leader. But lawmaker Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, treasurer of the Tory committee that organizes the party's leadership races, said "that ship has sailed".

"We now have to live with the fact that Boris Johnson will be prime minister until a successor can be voted on,” he said.

The main opposition Labor party said it was unacceptable and vowed to call to a vote of no confidence against Johnson in the House of Commons the next time we...