After being selected by the Conservative Party on Monday to succeed departing leader Boris Johnson as leader, Liz Truss will serve as the next prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Tuesday will see the formal appointment of the new prime minister by Queen Elizabeth when Johnson meets with her in Scotland to offer his resignation. A series of controversies that erupted in the first half of this year knocked Johnson, who has served as interim caretaker for the past few months, to the ground. He was forced to quit after losing the backing of numerous conservative lawmakers and even a number of ministers in his own government.
Truss, who is currently the foreign minister, has spent the summer campaigning against Rishi Sunak, a former finance minister of the United Kingdom, who is challenging her for the party leadership. Instead of a nationwide electorate, the election was decided by the votes of fewer than 200,000 grassroots party members.
After taking office later on Tuesday, the new prime minister will be faced with a rapidly worsening energy crisis in Britain. As a result of the conflict in Ukraine, gas and electricity prices are at record highs, and inflation is rising at a rate that threatens to plunge the nation into a severe recession.
In an interview this weekend, Truss stated that she will develop plans to address this economic crisis within days and is trying to “act immediately.”
Political analysts have said it will be difficult for her to unify her divided Conservatives, who still enjoy a sizable majority in the country’s parliament—ironically, thanks to Johnson’s enormous success as a campaigner during the last national elections—despite the fact that Sunak, her opponent in the leadership race, has pledged to support a new government even if he is not the leader.
