Liz Truss, who has been serving as the country’s foreign minister for the past 12 months, has been named as the Conservative Party’s new leader. She will most likely be officially sworn in as the new prime minister on Tuesday afternoon by Queen Elizabeth.
In her victory speech, Truss pledged, “I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy.” She also stated that she would address issues like the National Health Service and high energy costs.
The outcome was determined after a lengthy nationwide vote by party activists this summer. In a six-year period marked by political turbulence, Truss will become the fourth president of the nation.
Only three women have ever held the position of prime minister, and this will be the third time in recent years that this has happened without a general election held across the country.
“We will deliver, we will deliver, and we will deliver,” Truss said, echoing a key campaign theme. “And we will deliver a great victory for the Conservative Party in 2024” — when the next national elections are slated to be held.
Boris Johnson, who was ousted by a string of scandals that erupted in the first half of this year, is replaced by Truss. He was forced to resign after losing the support of the majority of his fellow Conservative lawmakers as well as many of his own ministers.
Rishi Sunak, the former finance minister of the UK and Truss’s opponent for the Conservative leadership, was the target of her summertime campaigning. Nearly 142,000 party members cast votes to determine the winner of the contest. More than 81,000 of those votes went to Truss, the lowest percentage of any leader in recent memory.
Johnson has continued to act as caretaker leader for the past few months, and he is scheduled to formally resign on Tuesday when he meets with the monarch in Scotland.
Later on Tuesday, Truss, the new leader, will probably make a statement in front of 10 Downing Street. She will be held directly accountable for Britain’s rapidly worsening energy crisis, which has resulted in record-high gas and electricity prices for both consumers and businesses due to the conflict in the Ukraine, as well as an increase in inflation that threatens to plunge the nation into a severe recession.
In an interview with the BBC this past weekend, Truss, who had already earned the moniker “PM in waiting” from one British newspaper, stated that she would draft proposals to address this economic crisis within the next few days and intended to “act immediately.”
Earlier in the leadership race, Sunak’s opponent Truss did not enjoy the same level of support from other Conservative lawmakers. Political analysts have predicted that it will be challenging for Truss to unite her divided Conservatives, who still hold a sizable majority in the nation’s parliament due, ironically, to Johnson’s enormous success as a campaigner during the last national elections. This is true even though Sunak has pledged to support a new government even if he is not the leader.
The party’s co-chairman, Andrew Stevenson, said at the announcement that the lengthy, drawn-out campaign this summer, in which the two “fantastic” candidates answered hundreds of questions from tens of thousands of members, demonstrated that the party was still “in good voice and good strength.” Johnson, who “rose to the challenge and delivered” throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently the conflict in Ukraine, also drew a large round of applause from the audience. Johnson was acknowledged by Truss as well, calling him a friend who was “admired from Kyiv to Carlisle.”
Before announcing the outcome, Sir Graham Brady, who chairs the committee of Conservative lawmakers in charge of choosing a new leader, praised both Truss and Sunak as “outstanding” and said they had both run “excellent campaigns.” He also thanked the party members and all candidates.