Mary Elizabeth Truss, serving as the Foreign Secretary since 2021, has emerged victorious in her race with Rishi Sunak to become the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Liz Truss got over 57% of the votes compared to Sunak, who served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Boris Johnson’s administration before resigning, who could only get just over 42%.
Over 172,000 members of the Conservative Party were eligible to vote during this election to elect their next leader, with 82.4% turning out to vote. Liz Truss got 81,326 votes while Sunak could only muster 60,399 votes. 654 ballot papers were rejected.
47 years old Truss was widely expected to win the PM race against Sunak after a campaign spanning the entire summer. The election for the new leader of the Conservative Party took place after the outgoing PM Boris Johnson was forced to resign following the resignations of most of his cabinet due to a number of scandals in his government.
Liz Truss, who says she was born to “left-wing” parents, switched to conservatives during her time at Oxford. She first fought elections on Tory party ticket from Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, albeit unsuccessfully. Currently, Truss is the MP from South West Norfolk.
Under Theresa May’s premiership, Truss served as justice secretary before moving on to become chief secretary to the Treasury.
When Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, Ms Truss was appointed as international trade secretary and later in 2021, she replaced Dominic Raab as the Foreign Secretary, becoming one of the senior-most members in the government.
Earlier in the summer, Boris Johnson resigned as the Prime Minister of the country paving the way for the election of Liz Truss as his successor. Johnson, who was already under pressure over his Covid parties, faced a full-blown rebellion over his appointment as Chris Pincher as the deputy chief whip of the party. The deputy chief whip had to step down after allegations that he groped two male colleagues at a London club in an inebriated state. Following this development, multiple sexual assault allegations surfaced against Pincher.
Boris Johnson appointed him as the deputy chief whip despite knowing about these allegations back in February. The party MPs said that they could no longer support a leader who lied blatantly while appointing Pincher. This initiated the flood of resignations from his government which ended up with Johnson leaving 10 Downing Street.