RISHI Sunak and Penny Mordaunt have remained frontrunners to fight out the race to become next prime minister as Suella Braverman was eliminated from the Tory leadership contest at the second hurdle.

The Attorney General for England and Wales has dropped out of the race after only securing 27 votes from Tory MPs in the second round of the contest.

Mr Sunak came top of the list with 101 votes, ahead of Ms Mordaunt with the backing of 83 of her Tory colleagues.

Liz Truss remains in third place with 64 votes, with Kemi Badenoch on 49 and Tom Tugendhat on 32.

The final two candidates will make it through to a leadership contest voted on by Conservative members, with Ms Mordaunt the favourite amongst activists.

In the second round of voting, Mr Sunak put on an extra 13 votes and is closing in on the 120 votes required to guarantee a place in the final two.

Writing on Twitter, Mr Sunak, said: “I am incredibly grateful for the continued support from my colleagues and the wider public.

“I am prepared to give everything I have in service to our nation.

“Together we can restore trust, rebuild our economy and reunite the country.”

Ms Truss, who had a campaign launch speech earlier on Thursday, gained 14 votes but will hope that she can serve as a standard-bearer for the party’s right, picking up supporters from not only Ms Braverman but also Ms Badenoch – who is under pressure from the Foreign Secretary’s allies to pull out of the contest.

Mr Tugendhat also dropped five votes but insisted he would not quit the race, saying: “I have never turned down a challenge because the odds were against me. I don’t plan to start now.”

A Truss campaign spokeswoman said: “As Liz set out in her speech now is the time for MPs to unite behind the candidate who will cut taxes, deliver the real economic change we need, continue to deliver the benefits of Brexit and ensure Putin loses in Ukraine.”

Ms Braverman declined to say who she would be supporting but singled out Ms Mordaunt for criticism, accusing her of failing to stand up for women in her apparent support of transgender rights and of not being an “authentic Brexiteer”.

“My perception of Penny is she takes a different view to me when it comes to gender ideology and the position of trans, for example I think she said a trans woman is a woman, I disagree with that,” she told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme.

Ms Mordaunt has stressed that she has "never supported self ID" for trans people to obtain legal gender recognition, but backs gender recognition processes being updated.

Speaking to LBC, she added: "I think that we needed to do some things to make it easier for people to access services, the waiting list to access services were a couple of years, there were things that we could do to help people actually have their documents like driving licenses and passports actually in the same gender – terrible problems for people when that happened."

The attack was the latest in a contest which became increasingly vicious on Thursday, with allies of Ms Truss seizing on comments from former Brexit minister Lord Frost about Ms Mordaunt’s competence.

He said: “She was my deputy – notionally, more than really – in the Brexit talks last year.

“I felt she did not master the detail that was necessary in the negotiations last year. She wouldn’t always deliver tough messages to the European Union when that was necessary.

“She wasn’t fully accountable, she wasn’t always visible. Sometimes I didn’t even know where she was. This became such a problem that, after six months, I had to ask the Prime Minister to move her on and find somebody else to support me.”

Allies of Ms Mordaunt said she had “nothing but respect” for Lord Frost despite his scathing attack on her.

A source in the Mordaunt campaign said: “Penny will always fight for Brexit and always has.”

Former cabinet minister David Davis, a supporter of Ms Mordaunt, criticised the “black ops” being directed at her.

“I wouldn’t describe it as friendly fire,” he said. “It’s absolutely clockwork – you get to the point that somebody gets ahead and looks to be the real challenger and then the black op starts, the incoming fire starts.”