Boris Johnson 'flies back' as Rishi Sunak leads PM race

The race for the next prime minister of Britain is heating up with former premier Boris Johnson expected to enter the race.

Boris Johnson who has been on a holiday in the Dominican Republic was seen returning to London after telling an ally that he will run to lead the country again, The Guardian reported.

Rishi Sunak has secured the 100 MP nominations needed to enter the race to be the next Conservative leader and prime minister, his campaign says.

As the former prime minister raced back from his Caribbean holiday to drum up support among MPs, Rishi Sunak remained ahead and the favorite to win with close to 90 publicly declared backers, including Dominic Raab and Sajid Javid, and with his supporters claiming he had passed the threshold of 100 names required to get on the ballot paper.

However, Johnson won the support of six current cabinet ministers – Ben Wallace, Simon Clarke, Chris Heaton-Harris, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Alok Sharma and Anne-Marie Trevelyan – while the former home secretary Priti Patel is believed to be considering coming out in his favour.

Allies of Johnson boasted he would "easily" make the threshold of 100 MPs, and argued he would be a strong contender to win in a ballot of the 150,000 Tory members.

Neither Johnson nor Sunak have yet formally declared, while Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, became the first to announce she was standing.

Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson all need 100 signatures each to make it to the next stage.

Critics of the former prime minister said some Tory MPs would be likely to go independent or defect to another party if he won again.

William Hague, the former party leader, told Times Radio that bringing back Johnson was the worst idea he had heard in his 46 years as a member of the Conservatives, and would cause a "death spiral" for the party.

If all three candidates make it onto the ballot with the backing of more than 100 MPs each, there is the potential for Sunak and Mordaunt between them to try to knock Johnson out of the contest.

Johnson has close to 50 publicly declared supporters. Rees-Mogg, the business secretary, is one of those organising for Johnson, while the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, who ruled himself out of the race despite his popularity with Tory members, said he "would lean towards" supporting Johnson.