FOREST of Dean MP Mark Harper will face a date with his Conservative Party colleagues tomorrow (Thursday) to find out if his bid to become the next Prime Minister will go any further than the long list.

Mr Harper is one of ten candidates for the Tory Party leadership and officially launched his campaign in a Birdcage Walk function room in London on Tuesday morning as he tackled the big issues including Brexit and public spending.

The Forest MP has said he is an underdog but ‘a serious underdog’ as he made his speech at the event he called ‘Ask Me Anything’.

Mr Harper was introduced, as other candidates who have declared and got eight MPs to support them have done, as the ‘next Prime Minister’ as he walked in front of the waiting audience from the back of the room.

He immediately announced, as he took his jacket off, that it would be ‘my way of doing this rather than reading you a speech that somebody else has written’.

Before he took questions, he briefly outlined why he was standing for the leadership saying: “We are in very challenging times and this is going to be a very, very difficult next few months for whoever is elected as Prime Minister.

“We have got to get Brexit delivered, we have got to get the country governed properly for the next three years, and then we have got to fight and win the next General Election.

“I think I have a plan to do all three of those and then set out what the Conservative Party is about which is about freedom and it is about opportunity.

“Opportunity matters to someone like me. I am the first person in my family to go to university. I want that opportunity of doing as much as you can do to be open to everybody.”