Liz Truss is the UK’s next prime minister after winning the Conservative Party’s leadership contest on Monday.
Truss, the Hawkish Foreign Secretary, won 57 percent of Conservative party votes, beating Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor of the Exchequer, who garnered 43 percent of the votes.
The 47-year-old Truss will take over the leadership of the country tomorrow after months of scandals plunged Boris Johnson’s administration into crisis and forced him to resign.
It makes her Britain’s fourth prime minister in six years and third female leader, after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. Like them, she will be greeted by a fearsome array of problems.
As the new prime minister, Truss will also inherit a cost-of-living crisis, the aftershocks of Brexit, a war in Europe and dropping support for the Conservatives in the opinion polls.
“We need to show that we will deliver over the next two years. I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy,” Truss said after the result was announced, reports Reuters.
“I will deliver on the energy crisis, dealing with people’s energy bills, but also dealing with the long-term issues we have on energy supply.”
Truss emerged from a crowded field of eight candidates by appealing to party members with a single-minded message of tax cuts and smaller government. These are reliable Tory party touchstones, according to the New York Times, but some economists said her proposals would do little to solve Britain’s problems, and could even worsen them.
Boris Johnson will officially start the handover of the government tomorrow with first visiting Queen Elizabeth in Scotland to officially tender his resignation. Truss will follow him and be asked to form a government by the monarch.
Kwasi Kwarteng, widely tipped to be her finance minister, sought to calm markets on Monday, by saying in an article in the Financial Times newspaper that under Truss there would need to be “some fiscal loosening” but that her administration would act in “a fiscally responsible way”.
