Third female prime minister of the United Kingdom, after fellow conservatives Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and Theresa May (2016-2019), Liz Truss, 47, has gone through several positions in the governments of her party 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), she headed the Justice and Treasury portfolios. With David Cameron (2010-2016), she was in charge of Ambiente. In this latter role, Truss contrasted with her predecessor by saying that she believed in the climate change that scientists are warning about and also that humanity was contributing to warming.
Mary Elizabeth Truss will officially take over as head of government on Tuesday, having beaten former finance minister Rishi Sunak, 42, a billionaire former banking executive and grandson of immigrants, by 81,326 votes to 60,399. indians.
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 to attend Conservative Party conventions.
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.
As prime minister, Truss will face a long list of problems, which opposition lawmakers say is the result of 12 years of weak Conservative rule.
During the campaign, she promised to act quickly to tackle the UK’s cost-of-living crisis, saying she would present a plan within a week to tackle rising energy bills and secure future fuel supplies.
She also signaled that she would eliminate tax increases and cut other fees in a move that some economists say would fuel inflation.
That, along with a pledge to revise the Bank of England’s mandate while protecting its independence, has led some investors to ditch the pound and government bonds.
