<\/p>\n
By Joe Jackson and Jitendra Joshi<\/p>\n
London, United Kingdom \u2013 Liz Truss is set to become the shortest-serving prime minister in Britain\u2019s history, after the public, MPs and the markets comprehensively rejected the self-styled heir to Margaret Thatcher.<\/p>\n
Truss succeeded Boris Johnson by selling to the Conservative rank-and-file a plan to turbo-charge economic growth through tax cuts, via increased borrowing.<\/p>\n
She accused her rival in this summer\u2019s Tory leadership race, Rishi Sunak, of \u201cscaremongering\u201d when he warned that such an approach at a time of rampant inflation would drive up interest rates for millions of Britons.<\/p>\n
But that is exactly what happened.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Truss was forced to announce her own resignation, a week after firing her finance minister and \u201cideological soulmate\u201d, Kwasi Kwarteng, in a desperate bid to shore up her position.<\/p>\n
The Tories expect to have a new leader in place by October 28, meaning Truss will comfortably underperform 19th-century leader George Canning, who died in office after serving for 118 days.<\/p>\n
She is no stranger to screeching U-turns, having begun her political journey as the Liberal Democrat-supporting daughter of progressive parents. At that time, she also opposed the monarchy and Brexit.<\/p>\n
Her youthful calls to abolish the royal family ran headlong into her new role when Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, only two days after appointing Truss.<\/p>\n
The new prime minister paid tribute to the late monarch, curtsied to King Charles III, and joined the queen\u2019s successor on a tour of his new UK realms.<\/p>\n But her tribute from the steps of 10 Downing Street was widely seen as stilted, betraying the leaden oratory of Truss in comparison to the verbal theatrics of Johnson.<\/p>\n Yet after scandal-ridden Johnson, Truss\u2019s unvarnished style and promises of a right-wing agenda found favour with the Tory membership.<\/p>\n \u2018Human hand grenade\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s always been outspoken. She\u2019s always been a disrupter,\u201d said Mark Littlewood, head of the Institute of Economic Affairs think-tank and a former member of Oxford University\u2019s Liberal Democrat club with Truss.<\/p>\n \u201cYou really need to understand Elizabeth Truss as a kind of free-market liberal,\u201d he told AFP when she took power.<\/p>\n Truss\u2019s rise to become the UK\u2019s third female prime minister inevitably led to comparisons with the first: Thatcher.<\/p>\n During her year-long stint as foreign minister, Truss was pictured riding atop a tank and sporting a Russian fur hat in Moscow, just like the Tory icon.<\/p>\n Johnson\u2019s former top aide Dominic Cummings likened her to a \u201chuman hand grenade\u201d, and some MPs accused her of excessive self-promotion.<\/p>\n Truss admitted to not being the \u201cslickest presenter\u201d. She was mocked online for a bizarre speech she gave as environment minister in 2014, offering impassioned support for British cheese and pork.<\/p>\n Liberal to Tory<\/strong><\/p>\n Truss grew up first in Scotland and then in an affluent suburb of Leeds, northern England.<\/p>\n Her mother was a nurse, teacher and campaigner for\u00a0nuclear disarmament\u00a0who took her on protests, and her father was a left-wing maths professor.<\/p>\n During the Tory leadership campaign, Truss criticised her Leeds school for fostering \u201clow expectations\u201d.<\/p>\n That prompted a backlash from teachers, contemporaries and locals who accused her of inventing an \u201cinsulting\u201d back-story to curry favour with the Tory right.<\/p>\n Despite the school\u2019s supposed failings, she went on to Oxford, where \u2014 like Sunak \u2014 she graduated in philosophy, politics and economics.<\/p>\n At Oxford, she was president of the university\u2019s Liberal Democrat branch. At the party\u2019s national conference in 1994, she gave a speech calling for the abolition of the monarchy.<\/p>\n \u201cI was a bit of a teenage controversialist,\u201d Truss admitted during campaigning this summer.<\/p>\n By her own admission, her switch to the Conservatives shocked her parents, but she says her beliefs had evolved.<\/p>\n After university, Truss worked in the energy sector, including for Shell, and telecommunications before entering politics a decade later.<\/p>\n She was a local councillor in southeast London for four years and became an MP in 2010, part of a new generation of women and minority candidates encouraged by then party leader David Cameron.<\/p>\n He quashed protests from the local party in the agricultural South West Norfolk constituency, after it emerged that Truss had been having an extra-marital affair with a fellow Tory.<\/p>\n Her critics were dubbed the \u201cTurnip Taliban\u201d.<\/p>\n Truss\u2019s marriage to an accountant survived the episode, and he stood close by as she made her resignation statement outside 10 Downing Street. They have two daughters.<\/p>\n