Four hopefuls left in race to lead UK Conservatives, Mel Stride eliminated

LONDON (Reuters) -Four hopefuls were left in the race to become leader of the Conservatives on Tuesday after centrist former work and pensions minister Mel Stride was knocked out of a race set to shape the future direction of Britain's once dominant party.

The contest to replace former prime minister Rishi Sunak as leader will run until Nov. 2, after Conservative members cast the final ballots for a new head charged with turning around the fortunes of a party that suffered the worst result in its history in a July election defeat at the hands of Labour.

Tuesday's second round of voting again handed pole position to Robert Jenrick, a right-winger who quit as immigration minister as he believed the then-government's plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was not tough enough.

Jenrick won 33 votes while former trade minister Kemi Badenoch came in second with 28 votes. Former security minister Tom Tugendhat and former interior and foreign minister James Cleverly each received 21 votes, and Stride was eliminated after trailing with 16 votes.

After 14 years in power, the Conservatives saw their numbers in parliament drop to 121 seats in July's election from more than 360 in 2019. The small number of lawmakers combined with the final vote coming from Conservative members - for which the party offers no numbers - makes predicting the winner difficult.

Whoever assumes the mantle of Conservative leader faces an uphill battle to repair the damage it suffered during the last eight years of its rule, which were marked by chaos, scandal and deep divisions over Brexit.

Since former Prime Minister David Cameron stood down after losing the 2016 Brexit vote, the Conservatives have been through four leaders, three of them ousted by their own lawmakers.

All the remaining candidates have said they want to unite the party and return it to its conservative roots of small government, low taxes and personal freedoms, but they differ over how to tackle immigration, an issue that voters see as increasingly important when public services are stretched.

Jenrick says the only way to tackle rising levels of immigration is to set a cap on legal migration in the tens of thousands and to detain and remove within days those migrants who enter the country illegally. He also advocates for Britain to leave the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), a treaty agreed by almost every European nation.

Badenoch, has, unlike other rivals, refused to suggest a cap on the numbers entering Britain or to leave the ECHR. Instead, she argues the immigration system is broken, saying if the Conservatives can win back power at the next election, due before mid-August 2029, they must first sack civil servants or officials who are "squeamish" about deporting people.

(Reporting by Alistair Smout, Andrew MacAskill and Elizabeth Piper, editing by William James and Hugh Lawson)