After weeks of the Tory mudslinging over 15 leadership hustings, The United Kingdom has a new Prime Minister but who is Lizz Truss and what might her premiership hold?
Age: 47
Place of birth: Oxford
Home: London and Norfolk
Education: Roundhay School in Leeds, Oxford University
Family: Married to account Hugh O’Leary with two teenage daughters.
Parliamentary constituency: South-West Norfolk.
At the age of seven, Liz Truss played the role of Margaret Thatcher in her school’s mock general election.
But unlike the prime minister, who won a huge majority in 1983, she did not prove a success.
Many years later, Ms Truss recalled: “I jumped at the chance and gave a heartfelt speech at the hustings, but ended up with zero votes. I didn’t even vote for myself.”
Thirty-nine years on, she has become Britians third female Prime minister following in the Iron Lady’s lead for real.
Education and early years
Truss had a state secondary school education at Roundhay in Leeds, she then went on to read Philosophy, Politics, and economics, at Oxford University.
She was active in student politics, initially for the Lib Dems, but at Oxford, she switched to the Conservative party. Outside of her work in Politics, she worked as a management accountant.
She also worked in the energy and telecommunications industry for a decade as an economics director and commercial manager.
After multiple political setbacks in the 2001 and 2005 general elections, Ms Truss was elected as a councillor in Greenwich, SE London in 2006, from 2008, she was the Deputy Director for the right-of-centre Reform think tank.
Backed by then Conservative leader David Cameron, she was put on his priority list of candidates for the 2010 election.
Although an effort to de-select her by the constituency Tory group failed, she then went on to win the seat with a 13,000-vote lead.
After co-authoring a book, Britannia Unchained, a collaborative effort with four other conservative members, she worked as an education minister within Government and in 2014 was promoted to environment secretary until 2016.
What happened Post-Brexit?
After arguably the most important political event of this generation, The EU referendum, Ms Truss supported and advocated for the Remain campaign. Once the Leave campaign had won, she argued that Brexit was an opportunity to “shake up the way things work.”
Moving on, under Theresa May’s tenure ship, she worked as the justice secretary before becoming the chief secretary to the Treasury.
From 2019 onwards. After Boris Johnson became PM she moved to the international trade secretary, A role where she met global political and business leaders to promote UK PLC.
Two years later, she succeeded Domonic Raab in one of the most senior roles in Government as Foreign Secretary. Within that role, she pursued to solve the complicated problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol, by removing parts of a post-Brexit EU-UK deal, a move that was heavily scrutinised by the EU.
Also, during her time, she secured the release of two British-Iranian nationals who had both been arrested and detained.
What will a Liz Truss government look like?
Ms Truss’ leadership campaign has not been free from controversy. After being pressed on how she would deal with the cost-of-living crisis issue, she offered that she would be ‘’lowering tax burden, not giving out handouts.’’
The next British prime minister takes office at a moment of desperate anxiety for the UK, with gas shortages triggered by the war in Ukraine sending inflation to rates that haven’t been seen for a generation. With millions of families struggling to cover their bills, dockers, railworkers and even lawyers have held strikes to demand higher pay while teachers and nurses may follow in the fall.
The British public have been souring on the governing Conservatives after Boris Johnson was forced from office in July follow a string of scandals and the party is running about 10 percentage points behind the opposition Labour Party, with an election due in 2024. Truss’s policies have struck a chord with the Tory party members whose votes will decide the next prime minister when the result of their ballot is announced on Monday, but MPs are concerned about whether she will also be able to address the problems facing the country as a whole.
Some other ministers from the Johnson administration may remain in top government jobs, but Sunak supporters such as Dominic Raab, Michael Gove and Oliver Dowden, are expected to leave government and join the ranks of backbench MPs, who played a role in toppling three of the last four Tory prime ministers. (David Cameron was the exception. He quit after losing the Brexit referendum in 2016.)
In that respect, Truss would start in a more vulnerable position than her predecessors.
Most prime ministers derive their authority from a core support of MPs, but there are few Truss diehards in parliament. She only scraped into the runoff contest against Sunak and it’s her popularity with the rank-and-file that is likely to see her into Downing Street.
