The name of the successor of the resigning Boris Johnson at the helm of the Tories and consequently of the British government will be known today at lunchtime. At the end of a grueling electoral marathon, which passed through five votes, the shortlist of conservative candidates was narrowed to two: the current foreign minister and big favorite according to all polls, Liz Truss, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak . The race for the longest leadership in living memory ended on Friday afternoon, when the voting operations of the approximately 160,000 members of the party concluded. All the British media agree that Truss will be the third woman to lead Britain after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, all conservatives. If she wins, tomorrow 6 September, she will have to travel with Johnson to the royal estate of Balmoral, Aberdeenshire in Scotland, to receive the assignment from the hands of Queen Elizabeth, who is spending her summer holidays there. It is the first time that the handover takes place in Balmoral. So far the 96-year-old sovereign, who has been suffering from mobility problems since autumn, has appointed 14 premieres at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. The daughter of a maths professor who votes for Labor, after a short career as an accountant and a past in the Lib Dem ranks, Truss entered Parliament in 2010 and has since started climbing the party hierarchy. A supporter of ‘remain’ at the fateful referendum on leaving the EU in 2016, as the Guardian points out, she compensated for the ‘mistakes’ of her youth by quickly becoming an uncompromising ‘Brexiter’, relying on her loyalty to Johnson and her A comparison with the Iron Lady, whose iconic blouse with a bow often copies, challenged by 42-year-old Rishi Sunak, the son of two parents from East Africa but of Punjabi origin who moved to Great Britain in the 1960s . The wealthy family allowed him to attend one of the most expensive private schools in the country, the Winchester. Trained in Oxford before earning millions with hedge funds and becoming an MP in 2015, Sunak was an advocate of Brexit right from the start. Like Truss, he is married to two daughters, yet the candidate given up for defeat a year ago had the world at his feet, so much so that many predicted his swift arrival at 10 Downing Street as darkening clouds rolled in. they focused on Johnson’s political future. “Prime minister in waiting”, the Financial Times had even called it. Sunak’s popularity stemmed from being the initiator of a massive £ 350 billion state aid program for companies and individuals affected by the lockdown. His reputation, however, soon faded, not helped by the ‘tax gate’ of his billionaire wife, from the cost of living crisis to the accusation of stabbing Johnson in the back. Truss, on the other hand, started from the bottom of the group, but she was able to exploit the war in Ukraine to rise to the new Thatcher thanks to a harsh anti-Putin rhetoric. Honey for the Tory press and middle-class seniors who account for the largest chunk of party membership.As is often the case in British politics, the class played an important role and this became apparent when a video of a young Sunak who joked in a television documentary that he had no friends of the working class. For Truss, however, the first knots in foreign policy have already emerged. According to the Times, if she is elected she will declare China an “acute national threat” like Russia. She then became the protagonist of a long-distance controversy with Macron, who predicted “serious problems” between France and Great Britain, since the minister did not answer those who asked her if she considered the French president a friend or an enemy of the British. more than six months after the Russian invasion, whoever wins the Tory primary will first have to solve internal problems, first of all the increase in the cost of living, which in Great Britain – as in many other European countries – is reaching record levels. Truss launched his campaign with the promise of large tax cuts, recently ruling out energy rationing. A line that left Sunak with no choice but to stick to his orthodox position that the country cannot afford tax cuts given the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. It didn’t even benefit him to remember that his rival was a ‘remainer’. Meanwhile, there are already those who are betting, see Rory Stewart, on Johnson’s future return to politics. For the former Minister of Cooperation in Theresa May’s government, BoJo “hopes to do as Berlusconi”, that is, he trusts in a “populist return” after being forced by his own parliamentarians to leave the leadership of the country. The outgoing prime minister, for his part, tries to heal the fractures in the party, urging the Tories to support the new leader “with all their heart”. In an op-ed in the Sunday Express, Johnson said “now is the time to put aside the disagreements of recent weeks” and “put the national interest first”, saying he is convinced that whoever wins “will support families in need” because of Putin’s “energy” war and adding that if the Russian president “thinks he can succeed in his economic blackmail, he is deluding himself”.