Liz Truss Resigns As Prime Minister: What Now?

Newly elected British prime minister Liz Truss resigned on Thursday, 20 October 2022. After only 45 days in office, Truss announcing her resignation meant that she was now the shortest-serving PM in UK history. During her speech at Downing Street, she said that she had already spoken to the King about her resignation and that she would remain PM until her successor was chosen. 

The fact that yet another unpopular prime minister has been driven out of office just shows how volatile British politics has been since 2016, after the vote to leave the European Union instigated a battle for the direction of the country.

Not only did her economic program roil financial markets, but it also pushed up living costs for voters which led to her own party being enraged. Liz Truss accepted that she had lost the faith of her own party. When elected, she had promised tax cuts funded through borrowing, deregulation, and an immediate shift to the right in terms of cultural and social issues. However, last week she was forced to sack her closest political ally and finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, along with abandoning most of her economic program because of the crashing of the pound and British bonds, that only happened due to the huge amount of unfunded tax cuts. All this led to the approval ratings for her and the Conservative party to collapse, naturally. 

Chaos began when on Wednesday, 19 October, she lost the second of the government’s most senior ministers, while also having her lawmakers quarrel over policy. Facing mere laughter when she attempted to defend her record, it was evident that the parliament would soon collapse.

New finance minister Jeremy Hunt is now under extreme amounts of stress as he finds tens of billions of pounds of spending cuts in order to reassure investors and rebuild the overall fiscal reputation of Britain. The economy running at a 40-year high of heading into recession and inflation is only proof of the struggle being faced by millions of people in Britain due to the cost-of-living crisis.

Possible runners for the position are previously in the running, Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, along with the possibility of Boris Johnson coming back from his fallout in August. The Conservative Party will elect a new leader by 28 October.