The candidates will now be whittled down to a final two, whereby the winner will be decided by Conservative party members via a postal ballot, with process expected to be concluded by mid-July. But can any candidate pose a real challenge to the former Mayor of London?
UKIP Scotland leader Donald MacKay has shared his views on the ongoing Conservative Party’s leadership race.
Sputnik: Will the change in the UK’s leadership ensure that parliament can escape its ongoing deadlock?
Donald MacKay: They are all basically looking to advance their own particular self-interest, and deciding whether it’s in their interest to be apparently aggressively pro-Brexit, or aggressively against Brexit or whatever; I think it’s a game and a charade.
Sputnik: Do you think Boris Johnson will win the Conservative Party’s leadership race?
Donald MacKay: It looks like he will win; anything can happen, but it does look like he will win and I would be neutral about it. If you’re committed to leaving the EU; then you would have had a consistent line of approach of saying those things, he came out three years ago as being in favour of Brexit, having never mentioned a word about it as far as I’m aware before that.
It’s just a convenience. That is his position that he’s adopting in order to win this election, whether that represents what he really and honestly believes, I’m not sure that it does.
Sputnik: Would the push for Scottish independence be given a boost if Boris Johnson became the next British Prime Minister?
Donald MacKay: I think the Scottish independence issue is more likely to be affected by what I think is a growing disinterest from England; I’m inclined to say that English people are basically saying “if you want your independence, take it.”
The normal sense of affection for Scotland is rapidly dying because they see us, as frankly correctly, as a group of whingers who are constantly groaning and moaning about what we think we ought to have, when we are actually part of a very successful economic and political union called the United Kingdom.
I don’t think Boris Johnson’s election or otherwise will not make any difference. The Conservatives in Scotland have also got a leader who basically is pro-EU, and is in favour of the Scottish Parliament, which is nonsense anyway, so there is no kind of unionist force in Scotland anyway at the moment, and the independence movement may grow, not so much because of what Scotland thinks, but because of what England thinks.
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