The correct sentence would be "The candidate had been speaking for ten minutes"
What is Present Tense?
This refers to the use of tenses to show the events which happened in the present time frame.
With this in mind, we can see that because the present continuous tense "speaking", then it is worth noting that the action was continuous so we make use of the words "had been" to complete the sentence.
Read more about present tense here:
https://brainly.com/question/13204705
