Liz Truss has been voted as successor to Boris Johnson and will be the new Prime
Minister of the UK and also the 3rd female PM
Truss defeated rival Rishi Sunak with 81,326 votes to 60,399 among party members
and will take over as leader on Tuesday, as Britons face mounting economic and
social crisis.
She pledged action to tackle the crisis in a short victory speech at a conference center
in London on Monday. Without offering details, Truss promised a “bold plan” to cut
taxes and build economic growth, and “deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with
people’s energy bills but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy
supply.”
Monday’s announcement ends weeks of bitter campaigning during which Sunak, the
former Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), accused the Foreign Secretary
of risking a prolonged recession if she goes ahead with her promised tax cuts.
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Once Johnson formally resigns his post to the Queen on Tuesday, Truss will also visit
the monarch at her Scottish residence Balmoral, where, as leader of the largest party
in parliament, she will be invited to form a government.
Truss had been the frontrunner for weeks, and the 47-year-old will now follow
Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May to become Britain’s third female premier.
Despite voting to remain in the European Union back in 2016, she has found herself
to be the preferred candidate of the vast majority of Brexiteers in her party.
Her victory was smaller than expected, Conservatives who supported both candidates
are privately admitting. It had been predicted by many that her margin of victory
would be larger than the 18 percentage points announced on Monday afternoon.
In terms of her premiership, this could mean that she cannot run roughshod over her
MPs, who voted in greater numbers for Sunak than Truss in the parliamentary part of
this leadership contest.
And Truss could find that she has to accommodate a wider range of views from her
party, which could mean embracing Sunak’s ideas for helping Britons with the cost-
of-living crisis and a less aggressive approach to tax cuts — especially corporation
tax.
Many Conservative MPs are privately worried that Truss’s modern-day Thatcherism
could cost them the next election and will be leaping on the surprisingly low margin
of victory to encourage the next PM to soften her economic stance.
The opposition Labour Party immediately dismissed her arguments, saying in a
statement, “after years serving in Tory cabinets, nodding through the decisions that
got us into this mess, Liz Truss simply doesn’t have the answers to this crisis.”
