Mary Elizabeth Truss is the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She beat her rival Rishi Sunak in an election in which the roughly 160,000 members of the Conservative Party, which has a majority in Parliament, voted. In theory, Truss was elected as the new leader of the party and, in practice, to lead the United Kingdom at a time of serious economic crisis.
The inauguration takes place this Tuesday (6), when Queen Elizabeth II will announce her name in a traditional event of British politics – a little less traditional this time, as the Queen will be in Scotland, where she spends the summer, and not at the Palace. Buckingham, as usual.
Before becoming prime minister, Liz Truss, as she is commonly known, went through a variety of positions in the government of her conservative colleagues. With Boris Johnson (2019-2022) she was Secretary of International Trade and, since last year, she has served as Secretary of Foreign Affairs.
With Theresa May (2016-2019), he headed the Justice and Treasury portfolios. With David Cameron (2010-2016), she was in charge of Ambiente. In the latter role, Truss contrasted with his predecessor by saying that he believed in the climate change that scientists are warning about and also that humanity was contributing to warming.
At the age of 47, Truss begins his government on the eve of the “winter catastrophe”, as the British are calling the consequences of the energy crisis caused by the Ukrainian War. Electricity bills that used to cost an average of £2,000 a year are expected to jump to £3,600. The 80% increase, combined with inflation, could cause deaths and suffering in the second half of the year, with families being forced to choose between cooking or heating the house, in average temperatures between 4°C and 9°C.
Truss was severely criticized during the recent campaign for not delving into the issue, vaguely saying that she did not believe in making donations — in reference to the possibility that the government could offer benefits in assistance to families. Members of her own party came forward to criticize her.
In June, current UK inflation surpassed the annual average of 10% for the first time since 1982, when the countries were ruled by the also conservative Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990). Always compared to the former prime minister, Truss has already refuted the comparisons. “Margaret Thatcher is long gone. We have new battles to win. My personal philosophy is to give people the opportunity to make their own decisions.”
Another charge made to Truss was the change in position in relation to Brexit, the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, made official by Boris in January 2020. When polls indicated public support for the United Kingdom to remain in the bloc, she acted to favor of that, but changed his mind just when the polls tended to the exit.
Married and mother of two, Truss cited her parents in a TV debate in July. She’s not exactly what you’d call family pride: in fact, her parents were horrified when their daughter joined the Conservative Party. “I was brought up in a very left-wing environment,” she told The Guardian in 2009. Born in 1975, Truss grew up in Leeds, a major industrial city in northern England.
Priscilla Truss, mother of the new prime minister, was part of an NGO that fought for the disarmament of atomic bombs by the superpowers. The girl even participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations in her youth, led by her mother. But a mother is a mother, and when she first ran for parliament for the Conservative Party, Priscilla agreed to help her daughter campaign.
The father, John Kenneth, a university professor of mathematics, declined to participate. When a colleague of Kenneth’s learned of Elizabeth’s parentage, he sent an email saying: “I’ve seen your daughter become a s***”, playing on the idea that “tory” – a nickname for Conservatives in the UK – would be a dirty word. too ugly to write.
“I never met Tories at school. All my teachers were from the Labor Party,” Truss said of her life in Leeds. After a brief flirtation with the center Liberal Democrat party — the third largest political force in the UK, behind the Conservatives and Labor — Truss went to Oxford University. There he studied politics, economics and philosophy and also met conservative students for the first time. When she did her first internship, at the Shell company, she was already asking her bosses for time off so she could attend conventions in the Conservative Party.
During the campaign, Truss became involved in a controversy by criticizing her old school in Leeds. According to her, many children there were disillusioned with the low quality of education, to which the current director of the school replied that she did not know what she was talking about. “First she said our school was left-leaning and now she criticizes our teachers,” she complained.
Following Truss’ comments that the school was “red”, the fact that the Conservative Party actually controlled Leeds education policy from 1955 to 1997, which includes the years she studied there, came to light.
