‘Earth sends a warning’ and Tory race ‘wide open’

A number of the papers focus on the penultimate round of voting among Tory MPs in the party’s leadership election, set to take place on Tuesday evening.

The Times says the race has been “thrown wide open” after Kemi Badenoch and Liz Truss gained ground while Penny Mordaunt’s support slipped slightly in the last round.

The paper says the contest will “culminate in a clash between Mordaunt and Truss for second place” and that the key factor is likely to be who Ms Badenoch’s supporters shift their allegiance to if she’s eliminated.

The Daily Telegraph agrees, stating in its headline that Ms Badenoch is “poised to be kingmaker” as the contest reaches its crucial stages. On its front page, the Daily Express asks: “Can Truss turn up heat to battle Rishi in run-off?” It believes the foreign secretary, who won 71 votes in the latest ballot, up seven on the previous round, is now “gaining momentum”.

The Sun, like many of the other papers, leads with the heatwave gripping the UK, declaring that “Britain is melting”. It carries a close-up picture of one of the Queen’s guardsmen outside Buckingham Palace sweating under his bearskin hat. A similar image is on the front of the Daily Star, this time with a guardsman being given a drink of water while standing at his post. The headline reads: “And you thought YOU were having a bad day?”

“Blowtorch Britain” is how the Daily Mirror sums up the situation. It predicts that temperatures today could reach 43C, something it describes as a “record baker”. But the Daily Mail is unsympathetic, condemning what it describes as “snowflake Britain” for panicking over a two-day heatwave. Its leader column asks: “Whatever happened to keep calm and carry on?”

The Guardian has a collection of photos of people across Britain dealing with the conditions in different ways. Some are enjoying a picnic sitting in the shallows of Loch Lomond, while a woman in Manchester is using a fan as a makeshift sun shade, and a man in Glasgow is seen simply pouring a bottle of water over his head.

Turning to to the political aspect of the story, the paper reports that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been accused of “checking out” after missing meetings of the government’s Cobra emergencies committee about the heatwave.

The online-only Independent focuses on a High Court judge’s ruling yesterday that the government has failed to spell out adequately how it would achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The campaigners who brought the case said the finding suggested the strategy was “illegal and inadequate”. But the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is quoted saying: “The judge made no criticism about the substance of our plans, which are well on track”.

And the Financial Times reports that the listing of chip manufacturer Arm on the London Stock Exchange is on hold following the departure of Boris Johnson as prime minister. The paper says SoftBank, the Japanese holding company which owns Arm, had considered a share sale in London only because of strong incentives offered by the Johnson government, and that work on the offering has “in effect halted within the company”.