WORLD Boris seeks top job

PM May pushes for Brexit vote four as her reign nears end

BORIS Johnson has confirmed he will seek to become leader when UK Prime Minister Theresa May quits.

Mrs May has promised to set out a departure timetable early next month.

“Of course I’m going to go for it,” the former foreign minister, ex-mayor of London and leading Brexit campaigner said.

The decision comes as little surprise as Mr Johnson, one of the UK’s most identifiable politicians has long been known to covet the top job. But it effectively fires the starting gun on a race that already has more than a dozen runners.

Mrs May has promised to step down once the first stage of Britain’s exit from the EU is secured, but this has been put in doubt by repeated Brexit delays. At a meeting of senior members of her Conservative party on Thursday, Mrs May resisted growing demands to set out a detailed plan for her departure.

But Graham Brady, the chairman of the 1922 Committee of Conservative MPs, said she would do this after a parliamentary vote in the week beginning June 3 on legislation to approve her EU divorce deal.

“We have agreed that she and I will meet following the second reading (first vote) of the bill to agree a timetable for the election of a new leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party,” Mr Brady said.

Many of Mrs May’s ministers and senior politicians are already making moves for the leadership, holding photo opportunities and giving wideranging speeches that go well beyond their official briefs.

Mr Johnson – who has recently kept out of the limelight – quit as foreign minister last year over the government’s Brexit strategy.

He has been an outspoken critic of the divorce deal Mrs May struck with Brussels last November. The deal has been rejected three times and Mrs May announced this week she would put it to MPs for a fourth time in early June.