Almost two months after Boris Johnson finally put his faltering premiership out of its misery, Liz Truss was chosen on Monday to be his successor in 10 Downing Street. Hurrah.
Truss—who served as Johnson’s foreign minister and remained loyal to him even throughout a seemingly endless cavalcade of scandal this year, including the sex assault cover-up imbroglio which finally brought him down—was confirmed on Monday afternoon. After a bitter, weeks-long leadership race run against Johnson’s former finance minister Rishi Sunak, Truss secured the top job by beating Sunak by 57 to 43 percent in a vote of 172,000 Conservative party members. It is the third time in just six years that Tory members alone—a tiny fraction of the electorate—have chosen a new leader for the U.K.
On Tuesday, Johnson and Truss will travel to Balmoral Castle in Scotland where Queen Elizabeth will officially invite Truss to form a new government. The appointment would traditionally take place at Buckingham Palace in London, but the queen’s frail health has seen the ceremony switched to her vacation home to avoid the 96-year-old monarch having to travel. Truss will be the 15th prime minister received by the queen during her reign—her first, in 1952, was Sir Winston Churchill.
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While Britain may not be facing an existential threat, Truss will need a Churchillian test of resolve right from the moment she takes power. She will enter her office in 10 Downing Street to find a desk creaking under the weight of an in-tray filled with some of the heftiest crises facing the U.K. in recent memory.
The U.K.’s grim cost-of-living crisis—in which red hot inflation, unprecedented energy costs, and food price increases are set to leave millions of Brits cold and hungry when winter hits—will require immediate and drastic action after Johnson has allowed the mounting catastrophe to go distressingly unaddressed in the dying weeks of his premiership. After Truss was excoriated for initially saying she’d help with energy bills by cutting taxes instead of “giving out handouts,” she’s since promised to unveil a plan to help households with the spiraling cost of gas and electricity within a week of taking office. Exactly what that plan will entail remains to be seen.
For her critics, Truss’s volte-face on the cost of living is emblematic of an unprincipled readiness to back whichever position will advance her personally. Truss was a vocal Liberal Democrat while at Oxford University and some Tories are still wary of her Conservative bona fides. They’re also wary of Truss having voted to remain in the European Union during the 2016 referendum—when, in David Cameron’s government, it was politically expedient to do so—only to now position herself as a hardline Brexiteer. Even during her leadership campaign last month, Truss hastily dropped a plan to cut civil servants’ pay outside London after the proposal triggered uproar—only for her campaign to insist the abandoned policy had been misrepresented by the media.
Her wider economic plans have also been called into question. On Sunday, Truss defended her plans for a low-tax economy despite one flagship policy move—cutting social security taxes—will benefit the richest earners 250 times more than the poorest.
And Britain’s economic woes have also underpinned huge waves of strikes in vital sectors of the economy. On Monday, trial lawyers in England and Wales began an indefinite walkout over public funding levels, following railroad workers, garbage collectors, and postal staff around the U.K. in paralyzing industrial action. The bad news for Truss is that the strikes may yet get even worse with unions representing doctors and nurses, teachers, and civil servants all currently considering strikes of their own.
Truss will also be tasked with finding a way to break the deadlock around the Northern Ireland protocol, with the EU currently pursuing legal action against the U.K. over the thorny trade issue. Even the “United” part of the “United Kingdom” could unravel on Truss’ watch, with Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon seeking a new referendum on Scottish independence for 2023. A break up of the union would be seen as a symbolic disaster for a Tory prime minister (Truss’s party is officially titled the “Conservative and Unionist Party”). Truss poured kerosene on the burning issue during her leadership race by calling Sturgeon an “attention seeker” who should be ignored.
Oh, and there’s also the war in Ukraine to contend with. Truss has promised Kyiv that Britain will remain a stalwart ally even amid snowballing calamities at home.
And politically, Truss faces the additional Herculean challenge of keeping enthusiasm for the Conservative party alive in the minds of the electorate after 12 years in power; she’s now the fourth Tory prime minister since 2010. With the opposition Labour party opening up historic leads in opinion polls during the cost of living crisis, turning the Tories into a winning machine before the next general election (which will come no later than January 2025) will in itself be a gruelling task.
Before any of that, she’ll also have to win over lawmakers in her own party, who favored her rival Rishi Sunak in every ballot in the leadership contest conducted before party members got to have their deciding say in the crucial vote held last Friday.
“I think she’s a catastrophe,” one skeptical former Tory minister told The Daily Beast. “I think that intelligent people have already seen through her and as soon as she’s subject to more exposure and scrutiny, indeed just watching her performance, people will think: ‘Crikey, what have we got here?’ I think she’ll go straight down the plughole.”
