The only requirement to be leader of the Conservative Party is to be a member of the House of Commons and a member of the party for three months before the election. The party has 358 active MPs and it can be any of them except Boris Johnson: Party rules explicitly exclude a resigning leader from voting.
The election has two rounds or phases. The first round does not have fixed rules: these are prepared by the 1922 Committee (which brings together all the deputies who are not part of the Cabinet, and therefore are not obliged to vote with the prime minister) and are presented before the vote. In principle, the 1922 Committee is in recess until Monday the 11th, when it has to elect its new leadership.
The objective of the first phase is to screen the candidates until there are only two left in the running. In the last selection process, in 2019, each candidate needed the support of eight other deputies to be able to stand. Conservative deputies vote in successive rounds and the least voted candidates are eliminated.
In 2019, all candidates with less than 18 votes were eliminated in the first round; in the second, those who had less than 36 votes, and in the subsequent ones, the candidate with the least votes in each round was eliminated. In 2019 there were five rounds of voting; in 2016, there were only two.
In the second phase, the around 200,000 conservative militants are called to choose between the two most voted candidates. In 2019, Boris Johnson was elected with almost two-thirds of the vote: in 2016, the second phase was unnecessary after Andrea Leadsom resigned in favor of Theresa May.
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