Embattled U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss has been ousted from office.
Truss, a Conservative politician who was voted in as leader of her party only on Sept. 6, announced her resignation on Thursday.
She served the shortest term ever for a U.K. Prime Minister, 44 days. A leadership election will take place in the next week, Truss said.
“Our country has been held back for too long by low economic growth,” Truss said in a speech from the steps of 10 Downing Street on Thursday. “I was elected by the Conservative Party with a mandate to change this. We delivered on energy bills and on cutting national insurance. And we set out a vision for a low tax, high growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit. I recognise though, given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party.”
“This morning I met the chair of the 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, we’ve agreed that there will be a leadership election to be completed within the next week,” Truss added. “This will ensure that we remain on a path to deliver our fiscal plans and maintain our country’s economic stability and national security. I will remain as Prime Minister until a successor has been chosen.”
Truss’s leadership got off to a disastrous start after her emergency budget, announced by her closest ally, then Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, was met with almost universal horror, which saw interest rates rise while the value of the British pound plummeted against the U.S. dollar.
Within weeks Truss had sacked Kwarteng, replacing him with Jeremy Hunt, who backtracked on almost all of Kwarteng’s budgetary policies, including tax cuts and long-term support with the energy bills crisis.
The U-turn sealed Truss’s fate, which was further cemented by an interview with BBC News which was widely regarded as calamitous. Several Conservative members of parliament openly voiced their dissent against the Truss government’s fiscal policies and filed letters of no-confidence with the 1922 Committee.
Wednesday was one of the most chaotic days in the history of British politics. After seeming to survive a hostile period of questioning in parliament from the leader of the opposition, the Labour Party’s Keir Starmer, Truss had to face the shock of her Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, resigning on a technicality. Braverman delivered a stinging rebuke to the Truss administration in a letter on her way out. The evening saw pandemonium in parliament on an anti-fracking vote, which was also supposed to be a confidence vote on the government, and then not, and then was again, as directives from No. 10 appeared to change by the minute.
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