Liz Truss

Liz Truss (born July 26, 1975, Oxford, England) British politician who became leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister of the United Kingdom in September 2022. She announced her resignation as prime minister six weeks later.

Early life

Truss, who goes by her middle name, Elizabeth, rather than her given first name, Mary, was the child of left-leaning parents. Her father was a professor of mathematics at the University of Leeds and her mother was a nurse, a teacher, and a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activist. That Truss was taken as a child to demonstrations against the policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and chanted, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” would prove to be ironic when Truss later adopted Thatcher as a role model.

When Truss was four years old, she moved with her family from Oxford to Paisley, in west-central Scotland, where she attended primary school. Later they relocated to suburban Leeds, in northern England. There Truss studied at Roundhay School, a state-run comprehensive school that, as a politician, she would characterize as having underserved its students by teaching them about racism and sexism at the expense of fuller instruction in basic subjects—an assessment that would be refuted by political pundits and some of the school’s former students.

In 1993 Truss matriculated at Merton College, Oxford, where she studied politics, philosophy, and economics. There she became actively involved in politics, serving as president of the university’s Liberal Democrats. At age 19 she made a speech at the Liberal Democrats’ 1994 party conference in which she supported a motion that called for abolishing the British monarchy, saying, “We [Liberal Democrats] do not believe people are born to rule.” However, Truss’s foray into centre-left politics was short-lived. By the time of her graduation from Oxford in 1996, she had become a Conservative, having enthusiastically embraced the tenets of classical liberalism as a participant in the university’s Hayek society. In 1997 she met the man who would become her husband, accountant Hugh O’Leary, at a Conservative Party convention. They married in 2000 and have two daughters.

Following graduation Truss worked at Shell petroleum company, rising to the position of commercial manager. While at Shell, she qualified as an accountant. She then served as economic director of Cable & Wireless Communications (2000–05) and as deputy director of the right-of-centre think tank Reform (2008–10).

Political career

In the meantime, in 2001, at age 25, Truss entered parliamentary politics, running unsuccessfully for the seat representing Hemsworth in Labour-dominated West Yorkshire. In 2005 she came up short in another run for Parliament, this time for the seat for Calder Valley, also in West Yorkshire. In the run-up to that contest, the party had provided her with a mentor, MP Mark Field, who represented the Cities of London and Westminster. The two began a romantic affair that lasted some 18 months and resulted in the dissolution of Field’s 12-year marriage. Truss’s marriage survived the affair, but when it came to light in the press in 2006, it prevented her from continuing as the candidate that the Conservative Party had anointed, at the behest of Prime Minister David Cameron, to stand in a by-election for the solidly Tory seat of Bromley and Chislehurst, in London.

Truss had to answer for the affair again, this time in late 2009, when she sought to become the Conservative candidate for the largely rural constituency of South West Norfolk. After she was selected to be the candidate, some traditionalist members of the local party organization (subsequently dubbed the “Turnip Taliban”) raised the spectre of her affair with Field and demanded that she end her candidacy. Truss stood firm and was eventually chosen by a 132-to-37 vote to remain the candidate. She went on to win easily in the 2010 general election and entered Parliament.

Once in office, Truss founded the Free Enterprise Group, a collection of free-market-oriented Conservative MPs who advocated tax cuts and the deregulation of business and employment. Her vision of an unbridled free-market approach to the British economy was further reflected in Britannia Unchained (2012), a pamphlet she wrote with several other Conservative MPs, including Priti Patel and Dominic Raab, that described the British as “among the worst idlers in the world.” In September 2012 Truss was appointed undersecretary of state for education and childcare, beginning her roller-coaster ministerial career. In 2014 Cameron promoted her to secretary of state for environment, food, and rural affairs. Arguably, the most memorable moment of her tenure as environment secretary (2014–16) occurred at a Conservative Party conference where Truss—who is often characterized as a wooden public speaker—made an address including an awkwardly delivered statement that became an Internet meme: having sung the praises of British exports, she dourly told the crowd, “We import two-thirds of our cheese,” and then, after pausing to turn still more stone-faced, she spat out, “That. Is. A. Dis-grace.” Perhaps in response to the damage her public image suffered from the subsequent mockery, Truss thereafter dedicated considerable effort to carefully cultivating her presence on social media.

Truss enthusiastically supported the “remain” position on the Brexit issue, but, after the vote in the 2016 national referendum went the other way, she announced that she had been wrong. That same year she became the first woman ever to serve as lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice, having been named to that post by Cameron’s successor as prime minister, Theresa May. Truss quickly stumbled in that role, failing to adequately defend the judiciary when the press vehemently criticized the High Court for ruling that the official Brexit process could not be triggered without Parliament’s authorization. Truss’s mishandling of the matter was likely the cause of her demotion to chief secretary to the treasury in 2017.

In 2019, after May announced that she would resign as Conservative Party leader, Truss became one of the first ministers to back Boris Johnson’s bid to become the new party leader and prime minister. As premier, Johnson rewarded Truss by appointing her secretary of state for international trade and president of the Board of Trade in August 2019. A month later he added to her portfolio the ministership of women and equalities. As trade secretary, Truss met with international business and political leaders, traveling widely and exhaustively documenting those trips on Instagram. She earned a reputation as someone who got things done by negotiating post-Brexit trade deals with more than five dozen countries, though many of those arrangements merely mirrored those Britain had had as a member of the EU. The energy and optimism that Truss brought to her promotion of Johnson’s “Global Britain” agenda won the approval of Brexit hardliners such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and transformed her reputation within the party.

In September 2021 Johnson elevated Truss to the post of secretary of state for foreign, Commonwealth, and development affairs, replacing Raab. Thus, she became the second woman ever to hold that post. As foreign secretary, she sought to expand the global reach of Britain as it was seeking to recast its role in world affairs after its departure from the EU. Truss was at the centre of the U.K.’s strident response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but, even as she stood shoulder to shoulder with other European leaders in imposing unprecedented sanctions against Russia, she remained firm in her negotiations with them regarding post-Brexit economic matters. All the while, Truss seemed to be consciously styling herself as the second coming of Margaret Thatcher, not only in her championing of the free market, strong defense, and liberty and freedom as the lynchpin of political ideology but also in the way she presented herself to the world. Like the “Iron Lady,” she was photographed in a tank.

In July 2022, when a series of scandals (not least “Partygate”) forced Johnson to resign as Conservative Party leader, Truss was among the candidates to replace him as leader and prime minister. Few observers doubted her ambition, but some pundits and politicians questioned whether she was up to the task. Widely seen as the “continuity candidate,” she survived the votes in July by which the party’s MPs incrementally winnowed an initial field of eight candidates to three. Truss then outlasted trade minister Penny Mordaunt to join former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak as one of the two finalists whose names were submitted to a vote by the party’s full membership. In her head-to-head contest with Sunak, Truss strongly criticized him for having raised taxes as Treasury minister. She pledged to do away with the scheduled increase in the corporation tax from 19 percent to 25 percent and said that she hoped to effect the biggest change in U.K. economic policy in 30 years. When the results of the election were announced on September 5, Truss had captured 57.4 percent of the vote to become party leader. She took office as prime minister the next day.

Premiership

Out of the gate, Truss was faced with earthshaking developments, some of them of her own making. On September 8, only days after Truss had traveled to Balmoral Castle to receive her official appointment from the ailing Elizabeth II, the queen perished. As the U.K. undertook some 10 days of national mourning, Truss called the queen “the rock on which modern Britain was built.” 

Controversy and chaos came quickly for the new prime minister when she steamed full speed ahead with a “high growth, low tax” economic plan that included an unfunded £45 billion ($50 billion) tax cut in concert with generous subsidies for Britons facing high energy costs as a result of sanctions imposed on natural gas supplier Russia. The financial markets’ response to the imminent budget deficit that the plan portended was disastrous. The value of the pound plummeted, mortgage rates climbed, pension plans were hit hard, and the cost of U.K. government borrowing rose. To stabilize the markets, the Bank of England interceded quickly, buying up large amounts of government debt. In the hue and cry that followed, on October 14 Truss replaced Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, among her closest political allies, with former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt. In short order, Hunt dramatically reversed Truss’s economic plan, most notably revoking the tax cut and reducing the period of Truss’s proposed energy price cap from two years to six months, thus executing what some pundits characterized as the biggest U-turn in British economic history. Although a general election was not required until January 2025, Conservative MPs were alarmed by opinion polling that indicated a huge preference for a transition to Labour rule. With her continued leadership of the Conservative Party and premiership in peril, Truss apologized for the “mistakes” she had made. Technically, according to party rules, her position as party leader was protected for a year, but, with calls for her to resign multiplying among Conservative MPs, on October 20 Truss stepped down as party leader, pledging to serve as a caretaker prime minister until the party will have chosen her successor. Her tenure as prime minister was the shortest in British history. She was replaced by Rishi Sunak.