What the rise and rapid fall of Liz Truss, the UK’s shortest prime minister, was like

Liz Truss stepped down as prime minister after taking office just 45 days ago, the shortest term of any leader in the United Kingdom.

Truss was chosen by the members of the Conservative party in September, but soon lost authority after retracting a series of decisions that sank the country in weeks of political and economic turbulence.

LOOK: The keys to understanding the political chaos that ended the government of Liz Truss, the shortest in the history of the United Kingdom

The announcement of his departure comes days after his finance minister resigned and his replacement all but eliminated Truss’s free-market fiscal agenda.

On Wednesday, his home secretary also resigned, leading many Conservative MPs urge Truss to step down.

“I cannot serve the term for which I was elected,” Truss said as she announced her resignation in a brief speech outside the official Downing Street residence.

She indicated that she had informed King Carlos III of her resignation as leader of the Conservative Party and that she would continue to be Prime Minister. until a successor is chosen within a week.

Truss thus becomes the prime minister with the shortest time in office in the history of the United Kingdom.

And his departure creates a deeper crisis within his Conservative partywhich was already facing problems following the chaotic exit of Truss’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, in September.

But who is Liz Truss, and how did she rise through the ranks of the Conservative party?

In the footsteps of Thatcher

At the age of seven, Liz Truss played the role of Margaret Thatcher in a simulation of the UK general election at his school.

But unlike the prime minister, who won a large majority in the 1983 election, Truss was unsuccessful.

Many years later she remembered that fact: “I took the opportunity and gave a sincere speech in the ‘elections’, but I ended up with no votes. I didn’t even vote for myself.”

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Thirty-nine years later, Liz Truss had a real opportunity to follow the Iron Lady’s lead by becoming the Conservative leader and British Prime Minister.

Following Boris Johnson’s resignation, Conservative MPs held five rounds of voting to choose a new leader.

And Truss, then foreign secretary, became the winner after spending years building relationships with constituencies and remaining loyal to Boris Johnson during the darkest days of his tenure.

But in many ways, the new prime minister not a conventional conservator.

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Basic facts about Liz Truss

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Mary Elizabeth Truss was born in Oxford in 1975. She herself has described her father, a mathematics teacher, and her mother, a nurse, as “left-wing” people.

As a child, her mother participated in marches by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an organization that vehemently opposed the Thatcher government’s decision to allow American nuclear warheads to be planted at the former Royal Air Force base at Greenham. Common, West London.

The family moved to Paisley, west of Glasgow, Scotland, when Truss was four years old.

Her brother, speaking to BBC Radio 4, said the family liked board games, but the young woman Truss hated to lose and that he often disappeared before he had to risk not winning.

The family later moved to Leeds, in the north of England, where Liz attended Roundhay, a state secondary school.

Liz Truss, here as a teenager, has described her family as "left wing people".

He has said that during his time there, he saw “kids failing and being let down by low expectations.”

Some of Truss’s contemporaries at Roundhay have questioned her version of the school, including The Guardian journalist Martin Pengelly, who wrote: “Perhaps she is selectively using her upbringing and casually denigrating the school and the teachers.” who educated her, for a simple political gain”.

Regardless of his upbringing, Truss made it to Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics and was active in student politics, initially for the Liberal Democrat party.

At the party conference in 1994, spoke in favor of the abolition of the monarchy and told delegates, “We liberal Democrats believe in opportunity for all. We don’t believe that people are born to rule.”

political ambitions

In Oxford Truss He went to the Conservative Party.

After graduation, she worked as an accountant for Shell and Cable & Wireless, and married fellow accountant Hugh O’Leary in 2000. The couple has two daughters.

Truss stood as the Conservative candidate for Hemsworth, in Yorkshire, England, in the 2001 general election, But lost.

He then suffered another defeat at Calder Valley, also in Yorkshire, in 2005.

But despite the defeats, her political ambitions remained intact, and she was elected to the Greenwich City Council in south-east London. in 2006. Since 2008 she has also worked for the center-right think tank Reform.

The then Conservative leader David Cameron placed Truss in his “A-list” of priority candidates for the 2010 election and was selected to run for the secured South West Norfolk seat.

But she soon faced a battle with the constituency’s Conservative association which called for Truss to be removed after it was revealed she had had an affair with Conservative MP Mark Field a few years earlier.

The effort to oust her failed, and Truss won the seat by more than 13,000 votes.

Liz Truss succeeded Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street, the seat of the British government. (GETTY IMAGES).

She co-authored the book Britannia Unchained with four other Conservative MPs elected in 2010.

In it they recommended removing state regulations to boost the UK’s position in the world, and the book portrayed Truss as a prominent advocate of free market policies in the conservative ranks.

During a debate on the BBC during the campaign for the prime ministerial position, he was questioned for a comment in Britannia Unchained, in which he describes British workers as “some of the worst loafers in the world”.

She insisted that I hadn’t written it.

In 2012, just over two years after becoming a deputy, she entered the government as Secretary of Education and in 2014 she was promoted to Secretary of the Environment.

At the 2015 Conservative conference, Truss was mocked for a speech in which he said, in an impassioned voice: “We import two-thirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace.”

Drastic turn on Brexit

Almost a year later, possibly the biggest political event in a generation took place: the referendum on the European Union.

Truss campaigned to stay, writing in the Sun newspaper that Brexit would be “a triple tragedy: more rules, more forms and more delays in selling to the EU”.

However, after his side lost, changed his mind and argued that Brexit provided an opportunity to “shake up the way things work”.

Truss initially supported the option that the UK should stay in the European Union and later changed his mind on Brexit. (GETTY IMAGES).

Under Theresa May, Truss served as Attorney General and later Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

When Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, Truss became international trade secretary, a job that meant meeting with world political and business leaders to advance UK business interests.

In 2021, at the age of 46, he moved to one of the most senior positions in the government: Secretary of Foreign Relations.

In this role, he attempted to solve the thorny problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol, scrapping parts of a post-Brexit EU-UK deal, a move the EU fiercely criticized.

He also secured the release of two British-Iranian citizens who had been arrested and detained in Iran.

And when Russia invaded Ukraine in February, took a hard lineinsisting that all of Vladimir Putin’s forces should be expelled from the country.

But he faced criticism after he backed citizens in the UK who wanted to go to Ukraine to fight.

Charges and aids

Truss’s campaign for the leadership of the Conservative party was not without controversy.

When pressed on how he would address the country’s cost-of-living crisis, he said he would focus his efforts on “reducing the tax burden, not giving financial aid.”

During the boreal summer protests have been repeated in London and other cities due to the high cost of living. (GETTY IMAGES).

He also called Scotland’s chief minister, Nicola Sturgeon, an “attention seeker”, adding that she was best “ignored”.

The fall

Some have suggested that Truss, in her outfits, was trying to emulate another Conservative favourite: Margaret Thatcher.

But she brushed it off and as she told GB News: “It is quite frustrating that female politicians are always compared to Margaret Thatcherwhile political men are not compared to (former British Prime Minister) Ted Heath.”

But the comparison was perhaps not a handicap when he was trying to win support from members of the Conservative party.

That support, however, it quickly fell apart when Truss began his term.

The problems began three weeks after taking office with a disastrous “mini-budget” presented by his finance minister.

In it he proposed extensive tax cuts that caused a turbulence in the markets and the resounding fall in the value of the pound sterling.

More blows followed when the new finance minister, Jeremy Hunt, revoked almost all of Truss’s tax proposals.

The announcement constituted one of the most dramatic changes in modern British political history and was a Huge humiliation for the Truss leadership.

In recent weeks, support for the Conservative party has plummeted in opinion polls, intensifying unrest among its lawmakers.

With her resignation, Liz Truss now becomes the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history.

Source: Elcomercio