On 20 October 2022, under overwhelming pressure from within and outside his party, Prime Minister Truss announced that she would resign as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party after only 45 days in office, making her the shortest-serving British Prime Minister since the Second World War. In fact, until 19 October, Truss denied the possibility of resigning voluntarily during a parliamentary questioning. Faced with laughter in the halls of Parliament, the Prime Minister, who had been in office for only 44 days at the time, shouted “I am a soldier, not a deserter!” This brief 45-day tenure makes one wonder how Britain’s third female Prime Minister, who stepped into the center of power in Downing Street, came to be, and why she retired in disgrace after less than 50 days.

Elizabeth Truss was born in Oxford, England, on 26 July 1975. Like most politicians, Truss came from a good family and was brought up with a political education. Truss’s father, John Truss, was a university professor of mathematics, and his mother, Priscilla, was a nurse and staunch supporter of the British anti-nuclear movement, both left-wing and Labor Party supporters. 1993 saw Truss enter Merton College, Oxford, to study philosophy, politics and economics. During her time at university, Truss spoke out against the excessive power of the British Royal Family. At the time, Truss probably could not have imagined that she would become the future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and the video of the speech, which resurfaced with the help of the media on the day of the Queen’s death also the second day of her term as Prime Minister, caused her no end of trouble.

After graduating from university in 1996, she worked for Shell and Cable & Wireless as a business manager and head of economics. 1998 saw Truss stand for the first time as a member of the Greenwich local council in London, but was unsuccessful. Over the next seven years, Truss made four unsuccessful attempts to stand as a regional councilor and as a Conservative candidate for her constituency. It was only in 2006 that Truss was elected to Greenwich Council.

Four years later, she joined the House of Commons as a Conservative MP, and in 2012, she joined the Cabinet as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education. Thereafter, Truss worked as a member of the Cabinet until July 2022, when Truss, then Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development, formally announced her candidacy for the leadership of the British Conservative Party.

On 5 September 2022, Graham Brady, Chairman of the 1922 Committee, a group of Conservative MPs in the House of Commons, announced the results of the vote for the Conservative Party leadership. The current Foreign Secretary, Elizabeth Truss, was elected as the new head of the Conservative Party, defeating the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunnucks, by 81,326 votes to 60,399. On 6 September, Elizabeth Truss was formally appointed by Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral Castle in Scotland as the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Inevitably, Truss, who holds the highest executive power in the UK, was put in contrast to Margaret Thatcher by the media. Without looking at the policies of Britain’s third female Prime Minister since then, at least on this point she and Margaret Thatcher agree: the UK under them is suffering from enormous challenges, for Truss the UK faces, high domestic inflation, an energy crisis due to sanctions against Russia, an overwhelmed National Health Service (NHS) affected by the Covid-19 epidemic… …Truss is about to take over a country’s economy that has never been in such a serious crisis. Truss seemed confident about all this, and as early as the election she offered her radical solutions to these problems.

However, since September, Truss, who is on the radical right of the party, has been pushing for massive tax cuts, which have led to a loss of confidence in the markets and a fall in the pound, breaking a 37-year record. Combined with the “cost of living crisis” induced by external factors such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Truss’s voter support had sunk to 16% by early October, without the “honeymoon period” of previous prime ministers’ first years in office.

To avoid a rout in the local elections in early 2023, the Conservative Party top brass began discussing “stopping the clock” in early October by replacing Truss with a more economically savvy and traditionally solid candidate. But Truss, known for his toughness, was reluctant to concede defeat and only slightly rolled back his reform measures, instead accusing dissidents of being “not real Conservatives” and further isolating himself. The two sides were deadlocked for a while as Conservative party rules restricted a vote of no confidence to the first year of a prime minister’s term.

The twist in the “intra-party confrontation” came on 14 October. Truss sacked Cabinet Secretary Kvartken and appointed his “long-time enemy” Hunt as his successor. This was seen as a de facto abandonment of her resistance: on the one hand, the appointment of Hunt as Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was totally opposed to Truss’s tax cuts, meant that the reform was over. On the same day that Hunt took office, the cabinet announced a return to the tax increase path of the previous government, which had restarted the proposal to increase corporate income tax by 6%. On the other hand, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the second most important person in the cabinet, and the fact that Truss replaced the Chancellor of the Exchequer one month after she took office and had to recruit her political opponents on the condition that she abandoned all her policies shows that she has no allies in her party.

Truss’s electoral success was based on her radical ideas. Truss’s defeat also stemmed from her radicalism. In July this year, when then Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to step down due to his electoral defeat and falling approval ratings, the party’s complex forces eventually split into a “stable” faction, represented by Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sunnucks, and a “radical” faction, represented by Foreign Secretary, Mr Truss. Today, the radicals, led by Truss, have failed in their attempts to reform Britain. There is evidence that former Prime Minister Boris is likely to return to Downing Street. At the same time, the Conservative representative, Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Sunnucks, is also a strong contender for the Prime Minister’s seat. Where Britain goes from here remains to be seen in the outcome of the next Prime Ministerial election.

By JIN Kaiwei