Conservative party candidate Elizabeth Truss has been named as the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, winning over fellow party member Rishi Sunak by a margin of over 20,000 votes on September 5. The final countdown in the over six-week-long gruelling campaign for the governing Conservative Party to elect a new leader came to a head on who will succeed ousted Boris Johnson as British Prime Minister.
While Foreign Secretary of Britain in Johnson's government, Truss, dominated the race among the wider party electorate who have been voting online and by post to elect their new leader. She is the third woman prime minister of Britain, after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
The winner was announced on Monday at 12:30 BST (17:00 IST) by Sir Graham Brady — chair of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs and returning officer of the leadership election.
So, who is Elizabeth Truss? All about the UK's new PM/Rishi Sunak's opponent
Notably, 47-year-old Truss, unlike her rival Rishi Sunak, is not a conventional Tory.
As a Liberal Democrat member in college, Truss addressed the party convention in 1994 asking for abolition of the Monarchy arguing, “We don’t believe people were born to rule.” She was also a supporter of the cannabis legislation and campaigned for “free the weed.”
As a young girl and under the influence of her left-leaning parents, Truss would often accompany her mother to marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament — an organisation vehemently opposed to Margaret Thatcher’s decision to allow US nuclear warheads to be installed at RAF Greenham Common in London.
But in the leadership battle of the Conservative party where the search is on for a decisive and strong leader, Truss has been trying to emulate Thatcher, one of Tory’s favourite leaders. From wearing a pussybow blouse to driving tanks and being photographed wearing a fur hat in Moscow’s Red Square, she has been busy convincing party members that she could shake-up the establishment as her idol — the ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher had done.
During the Brexit debate in the Conservative party, she had campaigned for remain. She felt Brexit would be a triple tragedy: more rules, more forms and more delays when selling to the EU. But when her side lost, she argued that Brexit provided an opportunity to “shake up the way things work.”
A party colleague from Lib-Dem days said, “It was difficult to figure out what she believed in as she was always playing to the gallery, rather than putting forward a genuine belief.”
Subsequently, many other politicians who came into her contact, felt the same way.
She was born in Oxford in 1975 and named Mary Elizabeth Truss, the eldest of four siblings and the only girl. But she hated her first name and preferred to be called Elizabeth.
Her father, John Kenneth Truss, was a professor of mathematics at the University of Leeds and her mother, Priscilla Mary, was a teacher and a nurse.
Later, her family moved to Leeds and she attended Roundhay, a state secondary school, after which she went to Oxford to read philosophy, politics and economics and was active in student politics as a Lib-Dem member.
While at Oxford, Truss switched to the Conservatives and joined the party in 1996 when factionalism was rampant under John Major’s leadership. She met her future husband, Hugh O’Leary, an accountant the following year at a Conservative party convention and they married in 2000.
Truss contested as a Tory candidate for Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, in the general election of 2001 and lost. She was defeated once again when she contested from another seat in west Yorkshire, Calder Valley in 2005.
But her determination to make a career in politics remained and she was elected as a councillor in Greenwich in 2006. Two years later she joined the right-of-centre Reform think tank.
Truss was introduced to party MP for Cities of London and Westminster, Mark Field as a mentor and to help her secure a more winnable seat in the next election. But the two got involved in an affair that ended Field’s 12-year marriage in divorce, while hers survived.
But her 18-month affair almost ruined her chance of representing the party in the parliament from the Tory safe seat South West Norfolk, due to strong opposition from local Tory members who wanted her replaced for concealing her affair to the selection committee.
But Truss managed to survive the crisis and won a vote supporting her as the candidate by 132 votes to 37.
Since becoming an MP in 2010, she has worked under three prime ministers and held six ministerial posts, becoming the first female lord chancellor in 2016 — the highest officer of the Crown.
Just after two years of becoming an MP, she entered the government as an education minister in 2012 and an environment secretary in 2014.
However, at the 2015 Conservative conference, she was mocked for saying in an impassioned voice: “We import two-thirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace.”
Truss does not enjoy public speaking and prefers closed-door meetings or small party gatherings. She also has a reputation among cabinet colleagues for leaking stories.
But she had the political instinct of being the first among her cabinet colleague to support Boris Johnson in the leadership race in 2019. After he became Prime Minister Truss was made international trade secretary that led her to travel around the world to negotiate trade deals with global political and business leaders.
In 2021, she was made the foreign secretary, one of the senior-most jobs in the government.
Her strong criticism of Vladimir Putin for the Ukraine war has led to a rise in her popularity among Tory members. Her success in securing the release of two British-Iranian nationals who were detained in Iran, also added to her rising stock.
In addition, Truss’s candidature has also found favour with Boris Johnson loyalists, as unlike Sunak and many other senior ministers, she had not switched sides and engaged in criticising the Johnson premiership.
But that is also the worry in many sections that if she wins one may see the same groups of people coming back to run the affairs of the new government.
“Liz is certainly very determined to get there, but the people won’t change that much and no one really knows what she might do if she gets there,” a party MP said.
Here's a look at what policy changes Truss proposed during her leadership campaign:
For the economy: Review the Bank of England's mandate without compromising its independence; no energy rationing; support fracking in areas where people back it; create low regulation "investment zones"; introduce minimum service levels on critical national infrastructure and raise ballot thresholds to limit strike action; and reform mortgage assessments to help those renting gain access to the housing market.
For domestic issues: Scrap home-building targets, incentivise local authorities to build more houses and speed up the planning system; review how Britain will reach its 2050 net zero target to see how it can be done in a more "market-friendly" way; no new Scottish independence referendum; a six point education reform package, including measures to cut childcare costs; temporarily expand seasonal workers scheme to ensure farmers have access to labour; tackle violence against women and girls including criminalising street harassment; increase frontline border force by 20 percent and double the border force maritime staffing levels; and review energy and water regulators, Ofgem and Ofwat, respectively, to ensure they are "much more effective".
On taxes: No new taxes; hold an emergency budget and review of government spending; reverse a 1.25 percentage point rise in payroll tax known as National Insurance (The rise was introduced by Sunak in April to help pay for the health and social care system); cancel a planned increase in corporation tax (This is due to rise from 19 percent to 25 percent from 2023 under plans announced by Sunak in March 2021); apply a temporary moratorium on environmental and social levies added to consumers' electricity bills; provide "immediate support" for households facing high energy bills. No specific details have been set out; not impose any new levies on unhealthy food and ditch plans to restrict multi-buy deals on food and drink high in fat, salt, or sugar; and review the way families are treated by tax authorities, with a view to easing the tax burden when family members are not working in order to care for children or relatives.
About international affairs: Increase defence spending to 3 percent of GDP by 2030 from 2.3 percent of GDP projected this year; make Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the first foreign leader she calls as prime minister, and work with G7 allies to provide more military and humanitarian aid for Kyiv; commit Britain to a lead role in a "new Marshall Plan" for Ukraine; update Britain's foreign policy to include a new focus on China and Russia; seek a trade deal among Commonwealth members to act as a bulwark against China; scrap all remaining European Union laws that still apply in Britain by 2023, including Solvency II regulation and seek regulatory divergence from the EU; pursue more third country immigration processing partnership schemes, similar to the existing agreement to send some migrants to Rwanda; reform the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) "so it works better for Britain"; and avoid setting an "arbitrary target" on immigration.
As Britain's foreign secretary, she was at the forefront of several trade deals signed after Brexit. She has secured supporters among the Conservative Party's right-wing for her promises to increase defence spending and slash taxes.
Truss has been a vocal supporter of Johnson, saying that as Conservatives "we need to stop apologising for who we are".
(With input from Reuters)