Laura Kuenssberg questions Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the new Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch on her Sunday morning show
Asked whether there is any chance she will rethink the National Insurance rise for employers announced in this week's Budget, Reeves says: "I'm not immune to their criticism... but we've got to raise the money to put our public finances on a firm footing"
Reeves also says the rise was not on the agenda before the election - and that Health Secretary Wes Streeting will set out allocations for GPs, who have demanded protection from the tax hike
Meanwhile, Badenoch tells Kuenssberg that the Tory party "got things wrong" in the past and lost public trust
"Promises on immigration and on tax were not kept and that's something that we need to change," she says, adding that she wants to "draw a line" and focus on the future
On National Insurance, Badenoch says Reeves' plan is "not coherent" and will "make all of us poorer"
The result of this leadership race will be announced in the next few minutes.
Speaking now is Tory party chair, Richard Fuller. He'll be followed by 1922 Committee chairman Bob Blackman, who will reveal the winner.
Whoever that is, Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick, will then give a speech.
The room in central London is filling up of those eager to hear who will be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
As a reminder, we're streaming a BBC News special on the result at the top of this page - hit Watch Live to follow along.
As we wait to hear from the chairman of the 1922 Committee to find out who will be leading the Conservatives next, here's a quick reminder of who the two contenders are:
Image source, PA MediaA new leader of the Conservative Party will be announced today just after 11:00 GMT, replacing former prime minister Rishi Sunak - who will formally stand down shortly after.
It's up to Conservative Party members to decide between Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch. Six contenders became two over various rounds, which began on 24 July.
Both candidates are on the right of the party. Robert Jenrick resigned his role as immigration minister,saying Sunak's emergency Rwanda legislation did not go far enough.
Kemi Badenoch was the former minister for women and equalities and emerged as a darling of the modern Conservative right for her stance on trans rights.
Badenoch is the favourite to win, our political editor Chris Mason says.
It's been a nearly four-month-long process to chose the next Tory leader. For those of you who've not been following all the twists and turns of the race, here's a quick look at how it played out.
Each candidate needed the support of at least 10 MPs to get on to the ballot, including a proposer and seconder. MPs could nominate only one candidate per round of voting.
On 29 July, the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee announced six contenders had met the requirements: Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat.
Applicants were also told they would each need to raise £200,000 for the party to progress to the final four.
After nominations closed, candidates had five and a half weeks to try to impress their fellow MPs before going to the polls. They were whittled down through four rounds of voting among their colleagues between 4 September and 9 October to to reach the final pair of Jenrick and Badenoch.
Conservative members then cast their votes between 15 October and 31 October to decide the winner, which we will hear shortly.
Henry Zeffman
Chief political correspondent
The Conservatives decided to have a long leadership election - it’s almost four months since the general election which precipitated Rishi Sunak’s resignation.
The opportunity for a lengthy debate about the direction of the party was prioritised over fears that taking so long would leave the new Labour government without proper parliamentary scrutiny.
Yet it’s worth noting that at the start of this contest Kemi Badenoch was probably the favourite, and going into today the conventional wisdom is that she’s likeliest to win too.
There have been significant twists and turns in the interim, most notably the shock (and essentially accidental) elimination of James Cleverly.
Still, some Conservative MPs I’ve spoken to have wondered whether they really did have the debate they were after.
Apart from anything else, a desire to avoid “blue on blue” attacks meant that Badenoch and Robert Jenrick never actually had a head-to-head debate.
Ahead of the result in about an hour, the Labour Party has weighed in on today's leadership election.
"The choice is between two people who each played their part in 14 years of Conservative chaos and decline, and who have refused to apologise it.
"Whoever wins, they have learnt nothing," a Labour spokesperson says.
The statement claims Robert Jenrick was "an immigration minister for a government that oversaw record immigration levels" and says Kemi Badenoch made offensive comments about autistic children.
The party says both candidates offer "more of the same chaos, division and reckless ideas".
After a four-month leadership race, 47% of people still don't know how they feel about Robert Jenrick and 43% about Kemi Badenoch, new research by YouGov has suggested.
The poll of more than 2,200 Britons indicates much stronger opinions on outgoing Tory leader Rishi Sunak, with 25% saying they have a favourable opinion of him, 68% unfavourable and only 7% don't know.
Similarly, Labour PM Keir Starmer has a 29% favourable rating, 63% unfavourable and 9% are classed as don't know.
Jenrick gets a slightly higher 13% favourable rating than Badenoch's 12% in the poll, which was taken between 30 and 31 October.
Among the 342 Conservative supporters polled, the pair are neck-and-neck, each getting a 35% favourability rating - although there were still 37% and 39% don't knows for Badenoch and Jenrick respectively.
It's only a matter of hours before the next Conservative Party leader is announced.
The process will begin at around 11:00 GMT, when we'll hear an introduction from Conservative Party chairman Richard Fuller.
Shortly after the result will be announced by Bob Blackman, who heads up the influential 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs.
Once he has revealed the result, the victor - either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick - will give a speech.
We'll bring you the result and analysis here, or you can watch the announcement by clicking Watch Live at the top of the page.
Image source, PA MediaBlackman announcing the result of a previous round of the leadership contest
Former Conservative special advisor, Claire Pearsall, says she's "fundamentally depressed" that neither leadership candidate has accepted where the party went wrong at the summer's general election.
"It will be a relief for the majority of people that the Conservative Party has finally picked a leader, but I don’t think it will be the uniting factor immediately that everybody hopes, " she tells BBC Radio 5 Live.
Asked whether the process - which began on 24 July - has taken too long, Pearsall says the Tories "missed a trick" not having a new leader in place to respond to Labour's Autumn Budget on Wednesday.
"We haven’t got that momentum, " she adds.
Chas Geiger
BBC News
Image source, Getty Images1. Melmentum
Despite having the lowest profile of any of the six candidates in the leadership race, Mel Stride had cultivated a reputation for having a safe-ish pair of hands and outpolled former Home Secretary Dame Priti Patel. in the opening ballot.
But any sense of "Melmentum" then stalled and Stride was knocked out before the roadshow moved on from Westminster to Birmingham for Conservative Party conference.
2. Merch wars
He would later be the next contender to be eliminated, but there can be no question that former soldier - he mentioned it once or twice - Tom Tugendhat won the "merch wars" at conference.
3. The debate that never was
Unlike previous Conservative leadership contests, there was no TV debate between the candidates this time.
Badenoch and Jenrick took part in a two-hour special on GB News, but did not engage with each other. They appeared separately to answer questions from Tory members and viewers at home.
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Jennifer McKiernan
Political reporter
Image source, ReutersShadow home secretary James Cleverly says he will not accept a frontbench role from the next leader of the Conservative Party.
The winning candidate - Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick - is likely to carry out an immediate reshuffle of the Tory frontbench team.
But Cleverly has told the Financial Times (FT) he will return to the backbenches, external rather than serve in either candidate's shadow cabinet.
Following the Tory conference, he briefly became the frontrunner in the race to replace Rishi Sunak, but was surprisingly knocked out in the final ballot of MPs.
He told the FT he had been "liberated" from 16 years on the political front line and was now "not particularly in the mood to be boxed back into a narrow band again".
Image source, ReutersThe biggest challenge for the next Conservative Party leader will be to reunite the party and claw back voters from Reform, Tory commentator Tim Montgomerie tells the BBC.
The founder of the Conservative Home website says the left have historically been divided between Liberal Democrats, Labour, SNP and Greens, where the Tories have had the advantage of dominating the right - until this election.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Montgomerie claims a new Tory leader "looks more worthwhile than a few months ago because of Labour's troubles" but says "the challenge persists" over uniting voters who have turned to Reform.
Speaking of internal divisions - such as former candidate James Cleverly announcing he won't accept a frontbench role from the next leader – he says the party "has to find a way of working together".
But Montgomerie also admits It will be hard to staff the opposition effectively when there's only 121 Tory MPs.
Image source, PA MediaSix contenders made the initial shortlist after gaining the support of at least 10 Conservative Party MPs.
On 4 September, Dame Priti Patel was the first would-be leader to be knocked out in the first ballot among her colleagues.
On 10 September, five became four when a second Tory MP vote knocked out Mel Stride.
The final four had a number of opportunities to speak directly to Conservative members at the party's conference in Birmingham, between 29 September and 2 October.
On 8 October, Tom Tugendhat was eliminated from the contest in the third round, and James Cleverly was knocked out the following day.
This left Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick as the final pair to be put to party members to pick the winner.
Helen Catt
Political correspondent
This all kicked off back on 24 July - and since then it's been a bit like a Strictly Come Dancing contest for politics nerds.
From a Conservative Party perspective, the point behind this lengthy process was to give members a chance to see the candidates up close and avoid rushing them into making a decision.
Meanwhile, in terms of parliamentary opposition it has left a bit of a vacuum. As acting leader Rishi Sunak hasn't been able to set a direction for what the Conservatives are going to do in opposition.
Whoever wins today, they've got to hit the ground running. They've got a huge task in rebuilding their party after their election defeat.
Both of them agree they've also got a huge job to do in rebuilding trust with voters - and that has to start quickly.
Chris Mason
Political editor
Famously, it is the hardest job in politics: leader of the opposition.
And it is particularly hard if your party has just gone down to a historically bad thrashing at the hands of the electorate.
Any glance at the history books might not lift the spirits of the winner either.
When the Conservatives last took an almighty pasting at a general election, in 1997, it took them 13 years and four leaders to make it back to power.
When Labour were turfed out in 2010, it took them 14 years and three leaders before they won again in July.
Nonetheless, the contest to replace Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader has been a competitive one.
And precedents are there to be broken – as recent British political history attests to.
Image source, PA MediaBorn in London and raised in Nigeria, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke became the Tory MP for Saffron Walden in 2017 under her married name Badenoch.
Known for her robust views and no-nonsense style, her political heroine growing up in Nigeria was Margaret Thatcher, according to Blue Ambition, a biography written by Tory peer Lord Ashcroft.
She returned to the UK at the age of 16 to study for her A-levels before gaining a masters degree in computer systems engineering from the University of Sussex.
She became more Conservative partly as "a reaction to the very spoiled, entitled, privileged, metropolitan elite-in-training at university", she told a Spectator magazine podcast.
Before entering politics, the 44-year-old - who has three children - worked in IT and banking.
She held a series of ministerial jobs under Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, who promoted her to business secretary.
But it is arguably through her other former role - as minister for women and equalities - that she has emerged as a darling of the modern Conservative right for her stance on trans rights.
She first ran for Conservative leader in 2022 following Johnson's resignation and came fourth, despite starting the race with a relatively low-profile.
Launching her latest bid, she said the Conservative Party needed to "stop acting like Labour" to win back power.
Image source, Getty ImagesRobert Jenrick has reinvented himself as being on the right of the Conservative Party, after beginning his political journey as a more centrist figure - as well as a close ally of former-PM Rishi Sunak.
In December 2023, he resigned his role as immigration minister, saying Sunak's emergency Rwanda legislation did not go far enough.
And he has since been outspoken about what he sees as his party's failure to deliver on its promises to cut immigration when it was in power.
In particular, he has led calls for the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
This helped him attract support from MPs previously loyal to his former boss at the Home Office, Suella Braverman, who ruled herself out of the leadership contest before it began.
The 42-year-old father of three was a corporate lawyer - and a director of auction house Christie's - before entering politics as the MP for Newark in 2014.
His Tory leadership pitch is that the party needs to confront hard truths - arguing only he can make the changes needed to win the next election.
In 2020, he was embroiled in controversy over his decision as housing secretary to grant planning permission for a housing development in east London linked to a Tory donor. In 2023, he made headlines again for ordering that murals of cartoon characters at a reception centre for child asylum seekers in Dover be painted over.
Conservative Party members cast their votes for either Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch between 15 October and 31 October.
They have made their choices via a secure online voting system, though this approach has previously been criticised for its susceptibility to hackers and rogue state interference.
To be eligible to vote, Tory party members must have been active for 90 days before the ballot closed, and to have been members when nominations opened.
The new leader of the party will be announced today - at which point Rishi Sunak will formally stand down.
