Kemi Badenoch and James Cleverly launched their bids to lead the Conservative Party on Monday after Rishi Sunak announced his resignation in July following the party's worst election defeat in more than a century to Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour.

Ms Badenoch vowed to tell her colleagues and the country “hard truths”, as she launched her campaign by setting out her vision of a smaller state with more emphasis on the family.

She is the bookmakers’ favourite to win and accused the last Tory government — in which she was business secretary — of “drift” and having “talked right, but governed left”.

Former home and foreign secretary Mr Cleverly also launched his own campaign vowing to restore business confidence in his party and announced he would reinstate the last administration's Rwanda deportation policy if he won power.

They are among two of six Tory MPs running to lead the party.

The other contenders are former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, ex-security minister Tom Tugendhat, former home secretary Dame Priti Patel and Mel Stride, who was work and pensions secretary in the last Conservative government.

A vote of Tory MPs on Wednesday will begin to thin the field, while the eventual winner is not due to be announced until November though pressure is growing in some quarters of the party for the final stage of the race to be expedited so that Mr Sunak’s successor is in place to respond to Labour’s first Budget on October 30.

The new entrants in the UK contest came as the three remaining contenders in the Scottish Conservative leadership race - Murdo Fraser, Russell Findlay, and Meghan Gallacher - took part in their first televised debate on STV last night.

Leadership contests in UK and Scottish politics have become in recent years fairly regularly events. However what is highly unusual is two leadership contests taking place in parallel in one party on different sides of the border. The winner of the Scottish race will be declared at the end of this month, meaning he or she will not know who their new 'boss' in London will be when they are elected.

Does that matter?

Simple reasoning suggests it's important for the two leaders to get on and are in broad agreement on their political outlooks on issues like the economy, public services and the UK's role in the world.

Recent history of the party on the two sides of the border has shown big problems when the two leaders did not have a decent relationship.

Former Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson was famously on different sides of the Brexit divide from Boris Johnson during the EU referendum and made no secret of the fact that she did not want Mr Johnson as PM.

Her allies even launched  "Operation Arse" to stop Mr Johnson's rise to the top job.

Perhaps wisely, Ms Davidson stood down from the role of Scottish Conservative leader in August 2019, shortly after Mr Johnson became UK Tory leader and Prime Minister after "Operation Arse" failed miserably.

Ms Davidson's successor Jackson Carlaw was then, however, left to deal with Mr Johnson as UK Tory leader and PM and it quickly became evident the two were not compatible either.

Shortly after his election as Scottish Conservative leader in February 2020 Mr Carlaw stated he would be in charge of the policies of the Scottish Conservatives, even if they were at odds with the UK party position but by that July he had resigned from the role with Douglas Ross succeeding him.

His relationship with Mr Johnson proved difficult.

After the brief spell of Liz Truss's premiership there was huge relieve among Scottish Conservative MSPs when Mr Sunak became PM.

So who succeeds Mr Sunak and Mr Ross will be key to the fortunes of the party on both sides of the border.

But judging from experience the new Scottish Conservative leaders will need to have a good working relationship with their counterpart in London - otherwise he or she may find they have a rather short lived career in charge of the party in Holyrood.