After 44 days in office, Liz Truss has resigned, making her the shortest-serving prime minister on record
Liz Truss has announced her resignation as prime minister and leader of the Conservative party after a tumultuous forty-four days in office.
Despite winning the tory leadership contest with 57.4% of the vote, Truss has been ranked as one of the most unpopular premiers on record, falling to a favourability score of –70 in a YouGov poll.
Truss and Kwarteng’s economic policies crashed the pound and skyrocketed inflation
The most significant event of Truss’s leadership was the September mini-budget, in which then-chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng announced £45bn in unfunded tax cuts.
The resulting economic spiral provoked an emergency intervention from the Bank of England and an unprecedented response from the International Monetary Fund.
Kwarteng was promptly fired, and successor Jeremy Hunt (who has already ruled himself out of the new leadership contest) immediately reversed most of the mini-budget’s proposals.
But weeks later, the UK is still coping with record inflation and significantly increased mortgage rates, further exacerbating the pressures of the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
A bill to resume fracking was the catalyst for loss of confidence in Liz Truss
After a series of u-turns on both her own campaign positions and those of the wider conservative Party, Truss was faced with a chaotic confidence vote last night on the Ban on Fracking for Shale Gas Bill, which would have allowed the government to resume fracking activities.
The vote was the scene of alleged manhandling and shouting matches between MPs, with a total of 32 Conservative MPs abstaining, including former prime ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson and former Truss ally and chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.
After Liz Truss has resigned, the future direction of the Conservative Party is in doubt
According to Truss’s resignation speech, the new leader of the Conservative Party will be elected in the next week.
Current favourites are runner-up Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and a possible returning Boris Johnson.
Despite this, Leader of the opposition Sir Keir Starmer and Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon have called for a general election, amongst many others.
Industry reactions
Commenting on the resignation of Prime Minister Liz Truss, Stephen Marcos Jones, CEO of the Association for Consultancy and Engineering (ACE), which represents the companies who design, deliver and manage our national infrastructure and built environment, said:
“The backdrop of political uncertainty of the last few weeks has made it almost impossible for businesses to plan, further compounding the macro-economic challenges we are facing.
“It is vital that the process to appoint a new Prime Minister is both decisive and swift, and that we return to a more measured political environment which gives businesses full confidence in the decisions taken by our Government.
“With this in mind, we hope that the positive steps on expediating 100 infrastructure projects, the intention to simplify the planning process, and the establishment of new investment zones – previously announced in the fiscal statement – are maintained by the next Prime Minister and new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt. We look forward to seeing this confirmed at the Mini-Budget a week on Monday.”
