After her victory in the Conservative Party vote this Monday, Liz Truss is on track to become British Prime Minister. If all goes smoothly, he will take office on Tuesday, after meeting Queen Elizabeth II during her vacation stay and getting her go-ahead to set up a government.
Truss, British Foreign Secretary, emerged victorious in the race to replace the scandalous Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party and take over as Prime Minister of the country. Truss got the 57% of the votes of Conservative memberscompared to 43% for former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak.
Truss, 47, will become Britain’s third female prime minister, after Thatcher, who ruled from 1979 to 1990, and Theresa May, who served from 2016 to 2019.
Liz Truss with her wife Hugh O’Leary, at the moment she announced that she had been chosen to succeed Boris Johnson as British Prime Minister. Photo: AP
From young liberal to Thatcher admirer
Although Truss participated in demonstrations against Thatcher in her childhood, as an adult came to admire the first female leader From great britain. She now, she about to enter 10 Downing St., she seems ready to fight an eagerness thatcheriano to transform the UK.
Members of the Conservative Party have embraced Truss’s promises to cut taxes and red tape and maintain Britain’s unconditional support for Ukraine.
Some see echoes of the Iron Lady — as Thatcher was known — in Truss’s vision of a “web of freedom” linking democracies around the world.
Rishi Sunak the former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer who was defeated by Truss in the Conservative Party election. Photo: AP
For critics, Truss is a unyielding ideologue whose right-wing policies will not help Britain weather the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic, Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Mark Littlewood, a libertarian commentator who has known Truss since her college days, said the new British leader is not so much a Conservative as a “radical” who, like Thatcher, wants to “reduce state intervention” in life. of people.
“I expect a lot of controversy and a lot of action,” Littlewood said.
An austere and liberal past
Born in Oxford in 1975, Mary Elizabeth Truss is the daughter of a mathematics teacher and a nurse. Her parents took her as a child to the anti-nuclear and anti-Thatcher protestswhere he remembers yelling, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie: get out, get out, get out!”
Liz Truss is the current British chancellor, and will be the third woman to be prime minister. Photo: AP
In a 2018 speech, he said he began developing his own political views at a young age, “arguing against my parents socialists in our left home“.
The family lived in Paisley, Scotland, before moving to Leeds in the north of England, where Truss attended a public secondary school, setting her apart from her many privately educated Conservative colleagues.
During the leadership campaign, Truss highlighted his relatively modest background. But he angered some former classmates and teachers when he said students at his school were “let down by low expectations, poor education and lack of opportunities.” Alumni of the school include academics, judges, and various other members of Parliament.
Truss went to Oxford University, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics, the career of choice for many aspiring politicians. She was president of the university branch of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Truss was an enthusiastic member of the party, which is economically centrist and supports constitutional reform and civil liberties. Truss posted signs of Free the Weed who campaigned for the decriminalization of marijuana, and in a speech called for the abolition of the monarchy.
Liz Truss established herself in the Conservative Party elections. Photo: REUTERS
After Oxford, Truss joined the Conservative Party, “when it wasn’t fashionable”, he later said.
His beginnings in politics
He worked as an economist for Shell and the telecommunications company Cable and Wireless. He was also part of a centre-right think tank, while becoming involved in conservative politics and defended the opinions thatcherianas free market.
She was a London councilor and stood twice unsuccessfully for Parliament before being elected to represent the south-west seat of Norfolk, in the east of England, in 2010.
She won the seat, which is safe for the Conservatives, after a bump in the road: some local Conservatives were outraged when it was revealed that she had had an affair with another MP when they were both married to other people.
Liz Truss is an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” who was the first woman to be a British prime minister. Photo: AFP
Truss managed to survive her critics and her marriage survived. She and her husband Hugh O’Leary, an accountant, have two teenage daughters.
founded the group Free Enterprisea set of Tory lawmakers thatcheristas who wrote “Britannia Unchained,” a political treatise that included the incendiary claim that British workers are “among the most idle in the world.”
David Laws, a former cabinet minister who worked with Truss in government a decade ago, remembers her as a forceful person and “mind-blowingly ambitious“, comparing her in his memoirs to “a young Margaret Thatcher at full throttle”.
Truss won her first Cabinet post as Food and Environment Secretary in 2014, making her biggest impression with a much-mocked speech in which she thundered that it was “a disgrace” that Britain imported two-thirds of its cheese.
In the 2016 British referendum on leaving the European Union, Truss supported staying, although she says she was always a natural eurosceptic. Since the vote, she has won over Brexiteers with her uncompromising approach to the EU.
She rose to Justice Secretary, but May demoted her to a more supporting role at the Treasury in 2017. When May was toppled for her repeated failure to break the political deadlock on Brexit, Truss was one of the first to support Boris Johnson to replace it.
When she won, Johnson appointed Truss as secretary of commerce, a role in which she went around the world signing post-Brexit trade deals and raising her profile.
Criticism and praise for your work
In September 2021, she was appointed Foreign Secretary, the head of British diplomacy. Her performance has drawn mixed reviews. Many praise her strong response to the invasion of Ukraine, and secured the release of two British citizens imprisoned in Iranwhere its predecessors had failed.
But European Union leaders and officials who had hoped she would set a softer tone for Britain’s relations with the bloc have been disappointed.
Amid trade disputes, Truss introduced legislation to breaking parts of the binding agreement between the UK and the EU signed by both parties. The 27-nation bloc has taken legal action against Britain.
Truss has at times suggested that the frequent Thatcher comparisons are sexist, but at other times has encouraged them. She has posed on a British Army tank in Eastern Europe, evoking an image of Thatcher during the Cold War. In a televised leadership debate, Truss wore a blouse with a bow like the one Thatcher used to wear.
Highlighting her modest background, evoking comparisons to Thatcher (who was the daughter of a grocer), said Victoria Honeyman, associate professor of British politics at the University of Leeds: “the working class girl who does good“.
Truss’s own personality hides behind a stern public image. His friends say that he has a funny side rarely seen in publicand who likes karaoke and blasting songs by Taylor Swift, Whitney Houston and Destiny’s Child.
Source: AP