Liz Truss resigns as Prime Minister: her doomed journey

Her leadership was short-lived. Liz Truss has stepped down as Prime Minister and confirmed her resignation in a statement given outside 10 Downing Street on 20th October.

After Truss declared she "cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party", a new leadership contest will be held. In order to ensure this is not prolonged, Truss has informed the public, a new leader should be elected 'within a week'.

"I have therefore spoken to His Majesty The King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party," Truss continued. Liz Truss was welcomed to her new post in September by Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth and much has changed in the short time she was PM.

In the period of less than one week, the Brits had gone from Her Majesty The Queen ruling over the country and Commonwealth and Boris Johnston ruling over government. A few days later, the British people had a King and Liz Truss.

In her last official act as the Queen, her Majesty appointed Liz Truss as Prime Minister. Her fifteenth of her glorious reign.

As she was still finding her feet as new P.M., new in the job, facing the blowout from Brexit, trying to rebuild her party's damaged image, and tackle the ever-increasing financial issues Liz Truss received the news we dreaded to hear. "The Queen is dead."

In a fairly uninspiring performance, Truss said all the right things but a lack of charisma and originality were clear throughout a speech that should have united a nation. How did Liz Truss get the top job, even for a short while? We take a look at her personal and political history that has led her to this challenging moment in the spotlight.

All was revealed on Monday 5th September as the new Prime Minister took on the Battle of Britain: soaring prices, a broken relationship with Europe and the people of Britain increasingly unhappy with salaries and the cost of living. Liz Truss had a monumental task to appease the great British public. Little did she know that these were soon to be the least of her problems.

Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were fighting it out to be the next Prime Minister. Liz Truss won the vote to be leader of the Tory party but quite a considerable amount. Rishi was out, Truss was in.

Looking at her past, it has to be said, there is very little consistency with Liz Truss. For example, she started her political journey as a Lib Dem (against Brexit).

She was also President of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats, a pro-EU party which is now pushing for a second referendum on Brexit.

She was a remain supporter, saying at the time: "I don't want my daughters to grow up in a world where they need a visa or permit to work in Europe, or where they are hampered from growing a business because of extortionate call costs and barriers to trade."

But in 2017 she said she had "changed her mind" on Brexit. Truss has turned more and more toward the right. Now she is a firm right wing Conservative and counts Nadine Dorries and Jacob Rees-Mogg as two of her backers. She is also suspected to have had the continuous support of Boris Johnson.

Despite all this political support, it turns out her father, a maths professor, refused to campaign for his daughter when she was seeking election in 2010.

In an interview with the BBC, Truss said her mum was a member of the nuclear disarmament organisation, CND, and went on marches with her when she was a child. She grew up protesting the right wing PM, shouting, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!”. She is certainly no longer a radical left-winger.

Liz Truss attended a public high school in the north of England and then moved 'down south' to Oxford where she studied philosophy, politics and economics. Following that, she worked as an economist and worked at Shell, Cable & Wireless, and was deputy director of the think tank Reform. She got involved in conservative politics.

Liz Truss then ran for parliament - and failed - twice. But finally she was elected to represent Southwest Norfolk in 2010 - an area in the east of England. Her political career had just begun.

To put it briefly, her career moved on - and up. But not without a few slip-ups along the way. She became foreign secretary last year but has had a few shifty moments during her time in cabinet.

Her rant about cheese spawned a whole world of memes, so did her passion for pork markets at her party's conference, “When it comes to British food and drink, we have never had it so good,” she said.

But after a brief pause, she then turned stony-faced, telling the audience: “At the moment we import two thirds of our apples. We import nine tenths of all of our pears. We import two thirds of our cheese. After another long pause for effect, she added: “That. Is. A. Dis-grace.” Pure meme material for the internet.

Of course, Truss has had the Russia/Ukraine war to attend to in her job. Many feared that her staunch criticism of Putin could have escalated tensions and do more harm than good. Although when face-to-face with the issue, Liz backed down and, in a meeting with the Russian foreign secretary, denied Russian sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh, two regions in the south of Russia, the Kommersant newspaper reported.

In 2019, Andrew Neil really got Liz's nerves up over the Tories housing record on television. Many believe a PM needed to be better on the screen and answering questions.

Liz Truss vowed to make cat calling and wolf whistling illegal. Not quite the action the Brits wanted perhaps as the U.K. crumbles and strikes had dominated the summer.

Married with two children, she is 46 and met her husband, an accountant, at the Conservative Party conference.

Truss is well liked by members of the Conservative Party and was known in her early years as the “human hand grenade.” Apparently she had a tendency to 'blow things up.'

Truss is well known for hosting social events for MPs, occasions which have become known as “fizz with Liz” - though some say that she doesn't use this term herself.

Liz’s career, though, almost came to an abrupt end after members found out – and objected to – her affair with another MP.

The MP was almost 8,000 miles away in Bali at the time Boris announced his resignation. According to Daily Mail, she cut the meeting short to fly back to London in order to get her name in the runnings to succeed Boris Johnson.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Truss said she was “the only person who can deliver the change we need on the economy - in line with true Conservative principles - and the only person capable of stepping up and leading the response to Ukraine and the increased security threat that the free world faces”. She didn't get much of a chance.