MADRID, Spain (VOLSAPRESS) – Liz Truss, 47, has held various positions in UK governments and is the UK’s third female prime minister, after also provincials Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and Theresa May (2016-2019). her classmates party.
With Boris Johnson (2019-2022) she was Secretary for International Trade, and since last year, she has held the position of Minister for Foreign Affairs. He presided with Theresa May (2016-2019) the Justice and Treasury portfolios. Together with David Cameron (2010-2016), he was in charge of Ambiente. On this latter stance, Truss contradicted his predecessor by saying that he believes in the climate change that scientists are warning about and that humanity is also contributing to warming.
Mary Elizabeth Truss will officially take over as prime minister on Tuesday (6), after winning by 81,326 votes to 60,399 for former finance minister Rishi Sunak, 42, a former billionaire banking executive and the grandson of Indian immigrants.
Truss, who is married with two daughters, cited her parents in a televised debate in July. It’s not exactly family pride: in fact, her parents were horrified when their daughter joined the Conservative Party. “I grew up in a very left-wing environment,” she told the Guardian in 2009. Truss was born in 1975 and raised in Leeds, a major industrial city in the north of England.
Priscilla Truss, the mother of the new Prime Minister, was part of an NGO campaigning for the disarmament of atomic bombs by the superpowers. The girl even participated in anti-nuclear rallies in her youth, which her mother took. But mother is mother, and when she first stood as a Tory candidate for Parliament, Priscilla agreed to help her daughter campaign.
The father, John Kenneth, a university mathematics professor, declined to participate. When a colleague of Kenneth learned of Elizabeth’s parents, he sent an e-mail saying, “I see your daughter has turned into a s***”, playing with the idea that “tory”—the UK’s Tory nickname—would be a damn too ugly word to write.
“I never met a Tory at school,” Truss said of her life in Leeds. “All my teachers were Labor.” After a brief flirtation with the centrist Liberal Democrats – the third largest political force in Britain after the Conservatives and Labour – Truss went to Oxford University. There he studied politics, economics and philosophy, and also met conservative students for the first time. When she did her first Shell internship, she was already asking her bosses to take hours off to attend conferences in the Conservative party.
During the campaign, Truss was embroiled in controversy when he criticized his former school in Leeds. According to her, many children were disappointed with the low quality of education, to which the current headmistress replied that she did not know what she was talking about. “At first she said our school is leftist and now she is criticizing our teachers,” he complained.
After Truss’s comments that the school was “red”, it emerged that the Tories did in fact control education policy at Leeds between 1955 and 1997, which includes the years she taught there.
As prime minister, Truss will face a long list of problems, which opposition MPs say are the result of 12 years of weak Conservative government.
During the campaign, she pledged to act quickly to tackle the UK’s cost of living crisis, saying she would present a plan within a week to tackle rising energy bills and secure fuel supplies for the future.
It also indicated that it would cancel tax increases and reduce other rates, in a move that some economists say will fuel inflation.
This, along with a promise to review the Bank of England’s mandate while protecting its independence, has led some investors to abandon the pound and government bonds.
