Kemi Badenoch has launched her bid for the Tory leadership while Suella Braverman said she has decided not to run.
Ms Badenoch, an early favourite with bookmakers, joins Dame Priti Patel, Mel Stride, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick in the race to replace Rishi Sunak as Tory leader.
Writing in The Times, Ms Badenoch said the party deserved to lose in the general election because it was “unsure of who we were, what we were for and how we could build a new country”.
She wrote: “The country will not vote for us if we don’t know who we are or what we want to be. That is why I am seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party to renew our movement and, with the support of the British people, to get it to work for our country again.”
The shadow housing secretary made a name for herself as an outspoken voice on gender issues, including by calling for a change to the Equality Act so that sex is defined only as someone’s biological sex.
Ms Badenoch has rejected calls for Reform UK leader Nigel Farage to be welcomed into the Tory fold.
Ms Braverman meanwhile said she had gathered enough support to compete in the race to replace Rishi Sunak but had decided not to run.
Writing in The Telegraph, the former home secretary said there was “still no consensus” on what led the Conservative Party to their worst general election defeat and that she had been “vilified” by colleagues for setting out her view.
She wrote that it was down to raising taxes while pledging the opposite, failing to cut immigration and overreacting to the Covid-19 pandemic.
She also blamed failing to “tackle the long tail of Blairism” contained in the Human Rights Act, Equality Act and European Convention on Human Rights and for being in power as “transgender ideology and critical race theory seeped into our institutions”.
The party must also confront the “existential threat” posed by Reform UK, she said.
She said she could not run for the leadership “because I cannot say what people want to hear”.
“I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory Party does not want to hear this. And so I will bow out here.”
Nominations close at 2.30pm on Monday.
Contenders need a proposer, seconder and eight other backers to stand.
The parliamentary party will narrow the field down to four, who will make their case at the Conservative Party conference, which runs from September 29 to October 2.
The final two, picked by the parliamentary party, will then go to a vote of party members in an online ballot that will close on October 31 with the result announced on November 2.
