Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain said on Thursday that she would resign, just days after her new finance minister reversed virtually all of her planned tax cuts, sweeping away a free-market fiscal agenda that promised a radical policy shift for Britain but instead plunged the country into weeks of economic and political turmoil.
Her departure after only six weeks in office — the shortest tenure ever for a British prime minister — was a rapid fall from power that throws her Conservative Party into further disarray, following the messy departure of Boris Johnson over the summer. She said she would remain party leader and prime minister until a successor is chosen within a week.
Ms. Truss’s political viability became tenuous after her proposals for broad unfunded tax cuts roiled markets and sent the pound’s value plunging. She suffered a grave blow on Monday, when her newly appointed chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, said that the government was undoing the last vestiges of Ms. Truss’s tax proposals. That announcement constituted one of the most dramatic reversals in modern British political history, and a humiliating repudiation of Ms. Truss’s leadership.
-
Ms. Truss announced her resignation alongside her husband in brief remarks outside 10 Downing Street, saying: “I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected.”
-
One week is an extraordinary quick turnaround for such a leadership election, and the procedure for selecting Ms. Truss’s successor was unclear. It will be presided over by Graham Brady, the chairman of a powerful committee of Conservative lawmakers, who told reporters that party members would be consulted about who the new leader will be. But he gave few details on the process and left open several scenarios.
-
Among the leading candidates to succeed Ms. Truss are Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor of the Exchequer who lost out to Ms. Truss in the party leadership campaign over the summer; Penny Mordaunt, leader of the lower house of Parliament; and Ben Wallace, the defense secretary.
-
The British pound and government bond prices rose on Thursday, but the market’s reaction was muted. While the change brings a firm end to Ms. Truss’s tax-cutting economic agenda, it introduces even more political instability to Britain at a time when households and businesses are grappling with a cost-of-living crisis.
