According to the rumor mill, the mild-mannered Mr. Hunt was the
candidate that Mr. Johnson most wanted to face in the runoff, and
all day Thursday there was speculation in Parliament of tactical
voting by his supporters to eliminate Michael Gove, the environment
secretary.

Mr. Gove was Mr. Johnson’s nemesis in 2016, the last time the
Conservative leadership was contested, and in the first of two
votes held on Thursday, Mr. Hunt had fallen slightly behind Mr.
Gove.

Yet, it was Mr. Gove who sank Mr. Johnson’s push for
the top job in 2016, and some lawmakers feared the consequences for
the party of a vicious fight between the old rivals. By early
evening it was announced that Mr. Hunt had pushed Mr. Gove into
third place in the final ballot, with 75 votes, eliminating him
from the contest.

Though Mr. Hunt opposed Brexit in the 2016 referendum campaign,
he now supports it. But lingering suspicions about the depth of his
commitment, coupled with his decided lack of charisma on the
campaign trail, have led opponents to call him “Theresa May in
trousers.”

Mr. Hunt’s public utterances have not always been as vanilla as
his critics claim. He once likened the European Union to the Soviet
Union, and caused some astonishment when he accidentally
described his Chinese wife as Japanese.

But foreign policy analysts say that he performed significantly
better in his post than Mr. Johnson, who never looked comfortable
at the Foreign Office and whose careless language was widely blamed
for worsening the plight of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a
British-Iranian woman who is being held in prison in Iran.

Mr. Hunt will now have the opportunity to make his pitch for the
top job and subject Mr. Johnson to some scrutiny in a series of
debates for party members around the country.

Image
The front-runner to lead the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson,
left, and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt during a BBC television
leadership debate in London on Tuesday.CreditJeff Overs/BBC

Under Britain’s parliamentary system the prime minister is not
directly elected but is the leader of the party with a majority in
Parliament. That means that if the dominant party’s leadership
changes, so does the prime minister.

Mr. Hunt’s father was a senior Royal Navy officer and, like Mr.
Johnson, he studied at Oxford University and attended an expensive
private school.

A businessman before he went into politics, Mr. Hunt argues that
he is well equipped to negotiate a new Brexit agreement with the
European Union. And he showed his soothing manner and political
skills by surviving a long stint as the health secretary — a
difficult job for a Conservative politician, particularly at a time
of squeezed public spending.

One big question is how tough Mr. Hunt will be on Mr. Johnson
and whether he will raise doubts about his honesty, reliability and
competence for the position of prime minister. Although Mr. Hunt
criticized Mr. Johnson for ducking out of one TV debate, it was
another candidate, Rory Stewart, the international development
secretary, who was the most vocal in attacking the
front-runner.

The other central focus of the next few weeks will be what Mr.
Johnson says about Brexit, given that he is very likely to emerge
as the next prime minister.

Although hard-line Brexit supporters believe that he has
promised them that Britain will leave the European Union, with or
without an agreement on the next deadline of Oct. 31, Mr. Johnson
has been less explicit in public.

During a BBC debate on Tuesday, Mr. Johnson described that
timeline as “eminently feasible,” a phrasing that left significant
room for maneuver.

Senior Tories hope that the next phase of the contest will not
expose too many internal divisions. The prospect of a race between
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Gove, reviving one of the most treacherous
and poisonous rivalries of recent British political history,
had sent shudders through the Tory ranks.

The two were friends as students at Oxford and both were
journalists before being elected to Parliament. Both also
campaigned for Brexit during the 2016 referendum and, when David
Cameron resigned as prime minister in its aftermath, Mr. Gove
supported Mr. Johnson as the successor.

Mr. Gove then changed his mind, ran himself and justified his
betrayal by arguing that Mr. Johnson was not equipped to be prime
minister. That wrecked Mr. Johnson’s first attempt to win the
Conservative Party leadership and opened the way for Mrs. May to
seize the crown instead.

Three years later, and restored to the cabinet, Mr. Gove also
posed a threat to Mr. Johnson because he was a supporter of Brexit
before him. He therefore had good credentials with Conservative
Party members.

But Mr. Gove’s campaign got off to a disastrous start
when he admitted having used cocaine two decades ago, an
acknowledgment that opened him to the charge of hypocrisy over his
later actions as education and justice secretary.