The UK’s next prime minister, Liz Truss, takes power as a traditional, low-tax Conservative eurosceptic promising to turbo-charge economic growth.
Her position is the polar opposite of how she started out, as the Liberal Democrat-supporting daughter from a family of progressives, who opposed the monarchy and Brexit.
Her self-styled lifelong political “journey” has prompted criticism that she lacks genuine conviction and prioritises power over ideology.
But her straight-talking style, calls for a smaller state and championing of free trade have proved popular with grassroots Conservatives.
Truss, 47, campaigned on a platform of slashing taxes and bulldozing bureaucratic “orthodoxy”, particularly in the finance ministry where she once worked.
“For a party that’s gone in a quite populist direction in recent years, she’s been able to present herself as more authentic, more ordinary,” said Tim Bale, of Queen Mary University of London.
“She sets herself up as — despite having been in government for eight years — almost outside that establishment and therefore the kind of person that you can rely on to represent you against that so-called ‘blob’.”
– Heir to Thatcher? –
To Truss’s admirers, her campaign was built on sincere long-held instincts and beliefs.
“She’s always been outspoken. She’s always been a disrupter,” said Mark Littlewood, head of the Institute of Economic Affairs think-tank and a former member of Oxford University’s Liberal Democrat club with Truss.
“You really need to understand Elizabeth Truss as a kind of free market liberal,” he told AFP.
Truss’s rise to become the UK’s third female prime minister has inevitably led to comparisons with the first: Margaret Thatcher.
As foreign secretary for the past year, Truss has been pictured riding atop a tank and sporting a Russian fur hat in Moscow, just like the Tory icon.
But she has batted away any suggestion of a deliberate visual ploy.
Yet like the “Iron Lady” she is faced with the daunting task of leading the UK out of decades-high inflation, a worsening cost-of-living crisis and industrial action.
Financial Times political commentator Robert Shrimsley believes Truss is the heir not to Thatcher but to Boris Johnson’s “cakeism” doctrine — being “pro having cake and pro eating it”.
She was, he wrote, the choice of a Conservative party that “dislikes hard choices” in contrast to her beaten rival, former finance minister Rishi Sunak, who campaigned for fiscal discipline.
– ‘Human hand grenade’ –
As foreign secretary, Truss spearheaded a raft of trade deals following the UK’s divorce from the European Union.
Truss has branded her initial opposition to Brexit a mistake, despite growing evidence of its economic costs, and has repositioned herself as a champion of the cause.
Issues around new trade arrangements in Northern Ireland are causing friction with Washington and Brussels and could prove problematic early in her tenure.
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