How Liz Truss ended up as Britain’s shortest-serving PM: Inside departing Tory leader’s ill-fated 44 days at No 10 after her disastrous mini-Budget proved fatal for her premiership
- Liz Truss resigns after just 44 days as PM. It took 55 days for Tories to elect her
- She is now set to hold unenviable record as Britain’s shortest-serving PM ever
- Ms Truss entered No10 on 6 Sept determined to put ‘Trussonomics’ into practice
- But financial turmoil ensued and – following a series of U-turns – she will now go
There were 55 days between the start of this summer’s Conservative Party leadership contest and Liz Truss being named the victor.
She lasted 44 days before announcing her resignation as Prime Minister.
It means she is now set to hold the unenviable record as Britain’s shortest-serving premier ever.
Her premiership has blown up quicker than anyone – perhaps including former No10 aide Dominic Cummings, who branded her the ‘human hand grenade’ – might have predicted.
Ms Truss entered Downing Street on 6 September determined to put her ‘Trussonomics’ agenda into practice.
She promised tax cuts and economic growth in a rejection of ‘Treasury orthodoxy’.
But her ambition to push ahead with those plans as soon as she entered No10 were almost immediately derailed by the death of the Queen.
It meant Ms Truss’s second-ever address to the nation in Downing Street was to deliver a tribute to Her Majesty.
Her third lectern speech outside No10 was her resignation.
Liz Truss, pictured with her husband Hugh O’Leary, was elected the Conservative Party leader on 5 September
She was formally appointed as PM by the Queen on 6 September. But her premiership was almost immediately put on hold by the death of Her Majesty two days later
Ms Truss’s second-ever address to the nation in Downing Street was to deliver a tribute tothe long-serving monarch
With the country plunged into a 10-day period of national mourning following the Queen’s passing, all normal Government business was put on hold.
It meant it wasn’t until 23 September that Ms Truss was able to outline her ‘Trussonomics’ plan to the House of Commons with her ill-fated mini-Budget.
Kwasi Kwarteng, the long-time ally and ‘ideological soulmate’ she had appointed Chancellor, vowed to abolish the 45p tax rate for higher earners, bring forward a 1p cut to the basic rate of income tax, and stop a planned hike in corporation tax.
But the £45billion of unfunded tax cuts soon spooked financial markets and sent Britain into economic meltdown.
Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng initially tried to ride out the turbulence.
Yet a growing revolt among Tory MPs saw the PM and Chancellor ditch their plans to scrap the 45p tax rate midway through the Conservative Party conference.
The rest of the Birmingham gathering of Tory MPs and party members was dominated by bitter infighting.
The conference culminated with Ms Truss making a keynote speech which focused on her attack on the ‘anti-growth coalition’.
Her reversal on the 45p tax rate was to be the first in a series of humiliating U-turns endured by Ms Truss.
With the financial turmoil continuing, Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng brought forward the date of a planned follow-up fiscal statement to their mini-Budget in a bid to calm the markets.
But greater action was needed and, after leaving a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC early, Mr Kwarteng returned to Britain last Friday to be sacked by Ms Truss.
He was replaced by former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who had supported Ms Truss’s rival Rishi Sunak during the Tory leadership contest.
Mr Hunt soon tore up the ‘Trussonomics’ vision and, in an astonishing statement delivered to TV cameras on Monday, he ripped apart almost the entirety of the mini-Budget.
On 23 September, Ms Truss and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng outlined their ‘Trussonomics’ plan to the House of Commons with their ill-fated mini-Budget
A growing revolt among Tory MPs saw the PM and Chancellor ditch their plans to scrap the 45p tax rate midway through the Conservative Party conference
The conference culminated with Ms Truss making a keynote speech which focused on her attack on the ‘anti-growth coalition’
With speculation over how long she could now last as PM – amid a torrent of her leadership campaign pledges being ditched – Ms Truss attempted a fightback on Wednesday
But her declaration she was a ‘fighter not a quitter’ proved short-lived when she announced her resignation today
With speculation over how long she could now last as PM – amid a torrent of her leadership campaign pledges being ditched – Ms Truss attempted a fightback on Wednesday.
She declared to MPs at Prime Minister’s Questions – which came soon after she was forced to suspend a key aide over vicious newspaper briefings – that she was ‘a fighter not a quitter’.
But her attempt to steady the ship lasted less than four hours with the bombshell resignation of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary.
The pair were claimed to have staged a fierce clash over migration policy – although Ms Braverman ostensibly resigned over a breach of the ministerial code related to sending an official document from her personal email.
More chaos ensured in the House of Commons last night when Ms Truss appeared to make a last-minute reversal on an earlier decision to make a fracking vote a confidence motion in her Government.
With confusion reigning in the Commons voting lobbies – and claims both the Tory chief whip and deputy chief whip had quit – there were allegations of Conservative MPs being shouted at by Cabinet ministers and physically dragged through the voting lobbies.
It appeared to be these scenes of complete disarray that led many Tory MPs to decide Ms Truss’s administration was no longer functioning.
A stream of backbenchers demanded the PM’s departure this morning.
Once more it fell to Sir Graham Brady – the chair of the Tories’ backbench 1922 Committee who previously delivered the last rites to Theresa May and Mr Johnson’s premierships – to tell Ms Truss her time was up.
From Lib Dem activist to Tory PM: How Liz Truss became the UK’s (and her party’s) third female prime minister
By David Wilcock, Deputy Political Editor for MailOnline
Born in Oxford, Liz Truss grew up in Paisley, Leeds and Canada, as her academic father moved between teaching posts.
John Truss and his nurse wife Priscilla, were both Left-wingers who took their daughter on CND marches.
After a brief flirtation with the Liberal Democrats, Ms Truss moved to the Right after encountering Conservative students at Oxford University, where she read PPE.
She addressed a Tory conference with Mrs T in the audience in 1997 and was elected Conservative MP for South West Norfolk in 2010.
She has recalled yelling a slogan while living in Scotland that perhaps no other Tory Cabinet minister has ever yelled before.
‘It was in Scottish so it was ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, oot, oot, oot’,’ she has told the BBC.
But Ms Truss also had an early ‘fascination’ with Mrs Thatcher, saying that she was around eight when she agreed to play her during a mock school election. ‘I got no votes,’ she conceded.
Truss (right) spent a cosmopolitan childhood in Paisley, Leeds and Canada, as her academic father moved between teaching posts. John Truss and his wife Priscilla, were both Left-wingers who took their daughter on CND marches (pictured with a CND banner)
The left wing father of Liz Truss (left, at a Lib Dem conference) is revealed to be so ‘sad’ at her politics that he finds it difficult to talk about it, reports say
Ms Truss says her father, a mathematics professor, has long struggled to comprehend her move to conservatism, believing, perhaps wishfully, she is a ‘sleeper working from inside to overthrow the regime’.
The family later upped sticks to Leeds, where Ms Truss attended the Roundhay state secondary school before studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University.
She played up her comprehensive education in the leadership race, saying that her school years in a well-off Leeds suburb made her want to try to give every child ‘the best opportunity to succeed’.
It was at Oxford University there that she became active in student politics, with the Liberal Democrats, and espoused the anti-monarchist sentiment.
‘I think it was fair to say that, when I was in my youth, I was a professional controversialist and I liked exploring ideas and stirring things up,’ she told the BBC’s Political Thinking With Nick Robinson.
Ms Truss and Hugh O’Leary, a chartered accountant, married in 2000.
She described her ‘dry-witted’ spouse as the ‘love of my life’ on Valentine’s Day three years ago.
Raised in Merseyside, O’Leary, 48, became a chartered accountant after studying econometrics and mathematical economics at the London School of Economics (LSE).
They met at the Tory Party Conference in 1997 and said of their first date: ‘I invited him ice skating and he sprained his ankle.’
Ms Truss married her husband, Hugh O’Leary, a chartered accountant, in 2000
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss visits British troops on deployment to Estonia last November. Mrs Thatcher in one in Germany in 1983
In 2009, it was revealed she had an 18-month affair with MP Mark Field four years previously.
According to Mr Field, the Oxford-educated son of an Army major, the affair ended in June 2005.
But the story led to unsuccessful attempts to deselect her as a candidate in Norfolk.
The members of South West Norfolk Conservative Association – branded the ‘turnip Taliban’ – insisted furiously that they were told nothing about this ‘skeleton in the closet’ before they voted for her.
The marriage survived and the couple went on to have two children.
She also won the election by a comfortable majority of more than 13,000 votes.
Before politics Ms Truss was an accountant for Shell and Cable & Wireless.
After the unsuccessful runs for the Tories in Hemsworth in 2001 and Calder Valley in 2005, she was elected as a councillor in Greenwich in 2006 before becoming deputy director of the right-of-centre Reform think tank two years later.
She served for years under Boris Johnson in senior Cabinet posts. Ms Truss also served under her predecessors Theresa May and David Cameron in a ministerial career that stretched back to 2012.
She first attracted public attention in 2014 when she was made environment secretary.
That year she made a viral speech to the Conservative Party Conference slamming UK cheese imports and highlighting the importance of ‘pork markets’ in China.
During her early days in Parliament, she co-authored the Britannia Unchained book alongside Thatcherite future Cabinet colleagues Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab.
It set out proposals to strip back regulation and encourage innovation, but caused controversy with a claim that British workers are ‘among the worst idlers in the world’.
Two years after entering Parliament, Ms Truss was part of the Government, being made an education minister in the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition.
After clashes with Lib Dem deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg, she was promoted to environment secretary in 2014.
But while her fortunes were rising in Westminster, her reputation as a speechmaker faltered.
It was in the environment brief that she gave an often-ridiculed address to the Tory conference where she discussed her left-to-right conversion in a pantomime manner.
Her tone switched to a serious one when decrying the state of play that saw the UK importing two thirds of its cheese. ‘That is a disgrace,’ she insisted, deadpan.
Ms Truss’s star kept rising, however, and she did a year as justice secretary before heading to the Treasury as chief secretary and then leading the Department for International Trade.
It was during this period that her prolific and carefully curated social media output saw the department nicknamed the ‘Department for Instagramming Truss’.
Another political conversion was under way, and she shifted from arguing to stay in the EU at the 2016 referendum to become a strong defender of the decision to leave.
She was rewarded with the role of Foreign Secretary, becoming only the UK’s second woman to hold the title, in September after Mr Raab was moved aside in the wake of his handling of the Afghanistan crisis.
In the Foreign Office she took a tough stance in talks and would anger the EU with legislation threatening to break international law over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
She would also oversee the successful release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori from Iranian detention where other ministers had failed.
The Foreign Office gave her a much higher profile and she seized on it with numerous eye-catching photo ops that bore a resemblance to Mrs Thatcher’s escapades.
Though the frequent comparisons with the Tory grandee are at times derided as lazy and sexist, they are comparisons that Ms Truss has clearly sought to encourage.
Ms Truss donned military gear and perched in a tank for pictures during a visit to Estonia, echoing an image of Mrs Thatcher in a tank in West Germany in 1986.
Her choice of Russian hat on a visit to Moscow in February emulated that of Mrs Thatcher’s three decades earlier, while a leadership debate outfit also bore uncanny similarities.
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