Eva Deschamps / September 6, 2022
The very liberal Liz Truss won the race on Monday to become British Prime Minister and succeed Boris Johnson, with the immediate challenge of tackling the historic crisis of purchasing power that has hit the UK.
Liz Truss, 47, was raised partly in Leeds in a left-wing family. She started out in politics with the centrist Liberal Democrat party, where she made a name for herself with her anti-monarchist views, before joining the Conservative party a few years later.
Her former Oxford University classmate Mark Littlewood remembers her as a strong personality who was already not afraid to assert herself. She was always outspoken. She was always a disrupter. There was never any doubt at the University about where she stood exactly on every subject and where she stood on many people. And that didn't really change during her parliamentary career. Of course, at the time she was a member of the Liberal Democrats. But I don't think that has changed much either. You really have to understand Elizabeth Truss as a kind of free market liberal, says Mark Littlewood, executive director of the think tank IEA.
First elected as a Member of Parliament in 2010, Liz Truss joined David Cameron's government two years later and held a series of ministerial posts. In 2016, she campaigned to remain in the European Union, but quickly changed her mind after the referendum result. Minister for Foreign Trade and then Foreign Affairs under Boris Johnson, she is in the front line of post-Brexit negotiations where she positions herself as the iron lady of British diplomacy. Considered the rising star of the Conservative Party, she is often compared to Margaret Thatcher. She is seen as having the advantage of being able to change her mind, to be flexible. I think that for many Conservative members, she reminds them a bit of Mrs. Thatcher, says Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics.
Liz Truss, who has remained loyal to Boris Johnson until the end when the number of resignations from the executive was counted by the dozens, will enter Downing Street in an explosive economic and social context, marked by inflation that exceeds 10 per cent and an exorbitant rise in energy bills that is strangling families, businesses and public services. In this context, she has no respite to convince, with two years to go before the 2024 legislative elections, when the labour opposition, which has a clear lead in the polls, hopes to unseat the conservatives in power since 2010. According to a recent YouGov poll, 52 per cent of Britons believe Liz Truss will be a bad or very bad Prime Minister.