Mary Elizabeth Truss (born 26 July 1975), commonly known as Liz Truss, is a British Conservative politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 6 September to 25 October 2022, and the Member of Parliament for South West Norfolk since 2010.
Liz Truss has had a very varied political career. While reading philosophy, politics and economics at Merton College, Oxford, she was president of Oxford University Liberal Democrats and a member of the national executive committee of Liberal Democrat Youth and Students (LDYS). However, the same year she graduated, 1996, she joined the Conservative Party. Regardless, she has been considered a rather liberal Conservative, especially on economic issues.
She stood unsuccessfully for the Tories at the 2001 and 2005 general elections in the constituencies of Hemsworth and Calder Valley respectively. During the 2005 Parliament, Conservative Party Leader David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, appointed her to the A-List of candidates who they hoped to use to broaden the appeal of the Party.
In the 2010 election, Liz Truss entered Parliament when she was elected for the open seat to represent South West Norfolk, following the retirement of MP Christopher Fraser. She was actually selected twice for the seat, beating five other candidates to become the prospective parliamentary candidate and then winning again after some members of the local Conservative Association found out she'd had an affair with MP Mark Field (not actually a secret — it was allegedly the first thing that came up when people searched for her name online) and got the association to rerun the internal election. Two years later, now-Prime Minister Cameron appointed her to her first ministerial position, as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Childcare and Education.
In 2014 she became Environment Secretary. In this role she made a much ridiculed speech at the 2014 Conservative Party Conference where she called it a disgrace Britain imported two-thirds of its cheese and that she would be opening new pork markets in Beijing.
During the 2016 Brexit referendum, Truss supported Remain. When the Leave campaign won, causing Cameron to resign as PM, his fellow Remainer and immediate successor Theresa May appointed her as the first female Lord Chancellor and justice secretary (the positions go together). This was criticised due to Truss' lack of legal expertise and experience. The former attorney general Dominic Grieve and the Criminal Bar Association criticised her for failing to support the judiciary and the principle of judicial independence more robustly, after three judges of the Divisional Court came under attack from politicians and from the Daily Mail for ruling against the government in R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.
After Theresa May's Pyrrhic Victory in the 2017 election, she reassigned Truss to be chief secretary to the Treasury, which was seen as a demotion. In the 2019 leadership election, she supported Boris Johnson. After he won, he promoted her to international trade secretary. In 2021 Truss was promoted again, to foreign secretary, which got people talking about her as a potential prime minister.
Boris Johnson was forced to resign on 7 July 2022, due to the mass resignation of various members of his government as a result of the fallout of the Chris Pincher scandal, over Johnson having appointed Pincher to be a Deputy Chief Whipnote despite knowing of outstanding allegations of sexual harassment against him. Truss announced her intention to stand, having stayed on in government. Though Rishi Sunak, the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer, looked the early favourite (he won every preliminary ballot of Conservative MPs), much of the party membership disliked him and blamed him for Johnson's fall, as he had been one of the first members to resign. In a competitive leadership race, Truss became one of the final two members, which then went to the party membership. She won the Conservative Party leadership on 5 September 2022, thus becoming prime minister-designate, the third woman to hold the office after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. She was appointed prime minister the following day by Queen Elizabeth II, who died only two days later.
The Queen's death on her second full day in office caught the new government and much of the public by surprise. Truss was making a Commons statement about energy bills when the news broke that Her Majesty was under "medical supervision", a euphemism that most in the media took correctly to mean that she was on her deathbed. At least one new minister turned up at their new department expecting a welcome only to be told instead that they had a meeting in thirty minutes that would discuss the implementation of Operation London Bridge (the plans for the Queen's death).
Truss was the fifteenth and final PM of Elizabeth's reign and the first PM to serve under Charles III; she would in fact reveal his chosen regnal name in her address from Downing Street on 8 September.note
In any event, Her Majesty's passing shut down domestic politics pretty much entirely for over a week until the funeral.
As prime minister, Truss inherited a cost-of-living crisis which she and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng,note attempted on 23 September 2022 to mitigate with a "mini-budget", which was heavily criticised for largely consisting of tax cuts for the wealthy and funding them with government borrowing. The global result, however, was far more extreme: the pound plunged in value against the US dollar, reaching an all-time low within days, collapsing the value of sterling for the foreseeable future, despite an attempted intervention by the Bank of England.note The government eventually U-turned on the tax cut for the highest income bracket, effectively killing its own authority.
That authority crumbled even further on 14 October, when Kwarteng (who by then had gained the nickname "Kami-Kwasi") was sacked, rendering him the second shortest-serving Chancellor in British history.note He was replaced with Jeremy Hunt, which was accompanied by another U-turn, this time on the reversal of corporation tax rises.
This was followed by, on 19 October, the resignation of her home secretarynote Suella Braverman after sending official documents using her personal email address. Later that day, there were chaotic scenes in Parliament during a vote on fracking, with mass confusion among Conservative MPs over whether it had been designated a confidence vote (meaning that voting against Truss' government — which supported fracking, counter to the manifesto under which they'd been elected — would get MPs thrown out of the party), reports of further resignations (which turned out to be inaccurate), and claims of bullying and intimidation from government ministers. This led to ITV News anchor Tom Bradby openly questioning what was going on
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As calls for her to resign reached a crescendo, she declared: "I'm a fighter, not a quitter!" However, this defiance was short-lived.
On 20 October, Truss announced her resignation, and officially resigned on 25 October, after 49 days in office, becoming the shortest-serving British prime minister in history, beating George Canning's record of 119 days.note For comparison's sake, Truss served only 19 days longer than the shortest-serving president of the United States, William Henry Harrison (who died of pneumonia and/or a gastrointestinal infection). Among non-caretaker prime ministers in other countries that copied the Westminster regime, she outlasted Arthur Fadden (briefly Australia's prime minister in 1941) by ten days; Robert Stout (who was New Zealand's prime minister for part of 1884) by 36 days; and came 19 days shy of the Canadian record for brevity set by Charles Tupper's 1896 ministry. She is also the first PM who never led their party in a general election since Neville Chamberlain (who served from 1937 to 1940).
On 24 October, with other aspiring candidates Johnson and Penny Mordaunt having dropped out of the Tory leadership contest, Rishi Sunak was elected leader of the party and, therefore, Truss' successor as prime minister.
There is a serious argument to be made to rank her brief premiership down amongst the worst in British history. Having taken office with the British economy in a moribund state and political tension at an all-time high, the actions she did have time to take sank the nation's fortunes and sowed chaos and social unrest that the succeeding government has struggled to manage, let alone quell.
In media
- Have I Got News for You:
- The show made the "two thirds of our cheese" quote a Running Gag, exploiting in particular how she said "That is a disgrace!" while punctuating every word.
- Another Running Gag was her proudly announcing she would be in Beijing later that year to "open up new pork markets," followed by an awkward smile, also taken from that same speech. That particular quote would also be heavily used on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
- She is one of the recurring characters of the impression-based sketch show Dead Ringers.
- After the magazine The Economist started a leader by commenting that the mini-budget had destroyed her Government after barely a week in power, comparing that timespan with "the shelf-life of a lettuce", the British tabloid newspaper Daily Star took it literally and responded to the increasingly tumultuous nature of her tenure by livestreaming an actual head of iceberg lettuce and seeing if it would expire before she left office. The lettuce won. The Daily Star responded to Truss' resignation by decorating the lettuce in her likeness and playing celebratory music. The lettuce gained enough traction in the media that Labour Party MP Chris Bryant remarked during a news appearance that "the lettuce might as well be running the country." After it won, fans flocked to the live stream to congratulate it.
- The final episodes of satirical panel show Mock the Week were filmed and aired during her short-lived administration. As there was a certain amount of suspicion that the show's cancellation had been prompted by BBC higher-ups (either sympathetic to the Conservative Party or nervous about possible reprisals) due to the show's tendency to make fun of the government and the Conservative Party in general, a certain amount of schadenfreude was had regarding Truss' misfortunes. In the finale, which was recorded before her resignation, numerous contestants openly speculated whether the show would somehow manage to outlast Truss' government despite having been cancelled; in fact, she had announced her resignation the day before it aired, and was out of office before the final two episodes were aired (although these were clip shows containing no new material).
