When does the Conservative party leadership contest end? What felt like five years, was in fact just five weeks and the Tory leadership race concludes at 5pm on Friday evening to a collective sigh of relief across the UK. Postal ballots were sent out between 1 August and 5 August. Any ballots received after 5pm on 2 September will not be counted. Online voting is possible until the close of the ballot. Who votes for the new Tory leader and the country’s next prime minister? Only party members are allowed to choose the leader and by default the country’s next prime minister. Who they are and how many there are is shrouded in levels of secrecy not too dissimilar to the freemasons. We know about 150,000 were registered and eligible to vote in the last leadership election, which took place way back in … 2019. Estimates suggest there are now between 180,000 and 200,000 Conservative party members, which makes up about 0.3% of the population. Research from the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary University of London suggests 44% per cent of the membership is over 65, 97% are white, and 54% live in the capital and the south of England. Go democracy! Who is running in the contest? In the blue corner, we have the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, and in the blue corner we have the former chancellor Rishi Sunak. When will the winner be announced? The candidate who receives the most votes will be revealed on Monday by Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee, a gathering of Conservative backbench MPs. It was set up in 1923 for the large influx of inexperienced Tory MPs following the 1922 Conservative election landslide. Who is expected to win? The new leader and prime minister of the UK is widely expected to be Truss (a sentence many never expected to read). What will happen when the new leader and PM is announced? The formal handover will take place on Tuesday. The Queen is recovering from the outgoing prime minister’s tenure in her Scottish pile Balmoral and will appoint the new PM there, which will be a challenge as it requires the winner to leave Westminster. And what of Boris Johnson? Johnson is expected to make a farewell address outside 10 Downing Street at about 9am on Tuesday. It is not known whether he has written two versions of the speech, one based on staying, one based on leaving.