By Sulaimon Jamiu
Liz Truss will become Britain’s next prime minister after winning a leadership race for the governing Conservative party on Monday, vowing to press ahead with promises of tax cuts and to deal with a growing energy crisis.
Truss, 47, prevailed over Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the Exchequer, whose resignation in July set in motion Mr. Johnson’s messy ouster.
Her victory, by a margin of 57.4 percent to 42.6 percent, was widely expected in recent weeks after she took a commanding lead in the polls.
Ms. Truss won 81,326 votes to Mr. Sunak’s 60,399 votes, a margin that while comfortable was not as overwhelming as some of the polls suggested it would be. Analysts noted that Mr. Sunak, not Ms. Truss, was the top choice of Conservative lawmakers in the first round of the leadership contest. All poll’s figures are given by Parliament insider.
The victory makes her Britain’s fourth prime minister in six years and third female leader, after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. Like them, she will be greeted by a fearsome array of problems.
Double-digit inflation, a looming recession, labor unrest, soaring household energy bills and possible fuel shortages this winter — all will confront Truss as she moves into 10 Downing Street.
Upon her assumption of office, she must repair a party deeply divided after Mr. Johnson’s turbulent three-year tenure, which peaked in 2019 with a landslide general election victory but descended into unrelenting scandals after that.
“I campaigned as a Conservative, and I will govern as a Conservative,” Ms. Truss told a party gathering in a businesslike speech after her victory was announced. “I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy,” she added.
Liz Truss, who served in Mr. Johnson’s cabinet and was not part of the Tory rebellion that led to his departure, will formally assume the prime minister’s title on Tuesday in a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, where the queen is vacationing.
At the same event, Mr. Johnson will bid farewell to the monarch just before that, drawing a curtain, at least for now, on his career as a frontline politician.
Still, Ms. Truss has made a remarkable political journey to the top of the Conservative Party, after being raised in a left-wing family, with a father who was a mathematician and a mother who was a nurse and teacher, she was an active member of Britain’s centrist party, the Liberal Democrats, as a student at Oxford University, once calling for a vote to abolish the monarchy.
