Mary Elizabeth Truss was born on 26 July 1975 and is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from September to October 2022.
101 Facts About Liz Truss
2.
Liz Truss became Member of Parliament for South West Norfolk in 2010.
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Liz Truss attended Merton College, Oxford, and was the president of Oxford University Liberal Democrats.
4.
Liz Truss founded the Free Enterprise Group of Thatcherite Conservative MPs and wrote or co-wrote a number of papers and books, including After the Coalition and Britannia Unchained.
5.
Liz Truss served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Childcare and Education from 2012 to 2014, before Cameron appointed her Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in his 2014 cabinet reshuffle.
6.
Liz Truss defeated Rishi Sunak in the Conservative Party leadership election to succeed Johnson, who had resigned in an earlier government crisis.
7.
Liz Truss remains in the House of Commons as a backbencher.
8.
Mary Elizabeth Truss was born on 26 July 1975 in Oxford, England, to John Truss and Priscilla Truss.
9.
Liz Truss is a descendant of Charles Truss, after whom Truss's Island on the River Thames is named.
10.
Liz Truss's father is an emeritus professor of pure mathematics at the University of Leeds, and her mother was a nurse and teacher.
11.
Liz Truss has described her parents as being "to the left of Labour"; her mother was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
12.
When Liz Truss later stood for election to Parliament as a Conservative, her mother agreed to campaign for her, but her father declined to do so.
13.
Liz Truss's parents divorced in 2003; at the 2004 Leeds City Council election, her mother unsuccessfully stood for election as a Liberal Democrat.
14.
The family moved to Paisley, Renfrewshire, in Scotland when she was four years old, living there from 1979 to 1985, with Liz Truss attending West Primary School.
15.
Liz Truss then attended Roundhay School, a comprehensive school in the Roundhay area of Leeds, which she later said had "let down" children, a claim disputed by others.
16.
Liz Truss praised what she described as the Canadian coherent curriculum and the attitude that it was "really good to be top of the class", which she contrasts to her education at Roundhay School.
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Liz Truss was remembered by adolescent classmates as a studious girl with "geeky" friends.
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Liz Truss reportedly had an interest in social issues such as homelessness.
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Liz Truss read philosophy, politics and economics at Merton College, Oxford, graduating in 1996.
20.
Liz Truss was president of Oxford University Liberal Democrats and a member of the national executive committee of Liberal Democrat Youth and Students.
21.
From 1996 to 2000, Liz Truss worked for Shell, during which time she qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant in 1999.
22.
Liz Truss co-authored The Value of Mathematics, Fit for Purpose, A New Level, and Back To Black: Budget 2009 Paper, among other reports.
23.
Liz Truss served as the chair of the Lewisham Deptford Conservative Association from 1998 to 2000.
24.
Liz Truss unsuccessfully contested the Greenwich London Borough Council elections in 1998 and 2002.
25.
At the 2001 UK general election, Liz Truss stood for the constituency of Hemsworth in West Yorkshire, a safe seat for the Labour Party.
26.
Liz Truss narrowly lost the election to the Labour Party incumbent.
27.
Under David Cameron as Conservative leader, Liz Truss was added to the party's "A List".
28.
In March 2011, Liz Truss wrote a paper for the liberal think tank CentreForum in which she argued for an end to bias against serious academic subjects in the education system so that social mobility can be improved.
29.
Liz Truss wrote a further paper for the same think tank in May 2012, in which she argued for change in the structure of the childcare market in Britain.
30.
In October 2011, Liz Truss founded the Free Enterprise Group, which has been supported by over 40 other Conservative MPs.
31.
Liz Truss has championed Britain following Germany's lead in allowing people to have tax-free and less heavily regulated "mini-jobs".
32.
Since Liz Truss published a paper on the policy for the Free Enterprise Group in February 2012, the policy has been examined by the Treasury as a policy to promote growth.
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Liz Truss has campaigned for improved teaching of more rigorous school subjects, especially mathematics.
34.
Liz Truss herself studied maths and further maths at A level.
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Liz Truss argued in 2011 that comprehensive school pupils were being "mis-sold" easy, low-value subjects to boost school results: comprehensive school pupils were six times as likely to take media studies at A-level as privately educated pupils.
36.
Liz Truss criticised the over-reliance on calculators to the detriment of mental arithmetic.
37.
From March 2011, Liz Truss was a Member of the Justice Select Committee, remaining on the committee until her appointment as a government minister.
38.
On 4 September 2012, Liz Truss was appointed as parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department for Education, responsible for childcare and early learning, assessment, qualifications, curriculum reform, behaviour and attendance, and school food review.
39.
Liz Truss sought to improve British standards in maths for fear that children are falling behind those in Asian countries, and led a fact-finding visit to schools and teacher-training centres in Shanghai in February 2014 to see how children there have become the best in the world at maths.
40.
Liz Truss outlined plans to reform childcare in England, which would overhaul childcare qualifications and increase the maximum number of children relative to adults in a care establishment, with the intention of widening the availability of childcare along with increasing pay and qualifications among staff.
41.
Liz Truss responded to Toynbee's challenge by saying that being an early educator was a very demanding job, requiring great and specialist expertise, for which she was not trained.
42.
Liz Truss became a member of the Privy Council the next day.
43.
In November 2014, Liz Truss launched a new 10-year bee and pollinator strategy to try to reverse the trend of falling bee populations, including a strategy to revive traditional meadows which provide the most fertile habitat for pollinators.
44.
Liz Truss cut taxpayer subsidies for solar panels on agricultural land, as her view was that the land could be better used to grow crops, food and vegetables.
45.
Liz Truss described farming and food as "hotbeds of innovation" and promoted the production and export of British food.
46.
In March 2015, Liz Truss was one of two cabinet ministers to vote against the government's successful proposal to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes, in what was technically a free vote.
47.
On 14 July 2016, Liz Truss was appointed as secretary of state for justice and lord chancellor in the First May ministry.
48.
Liz Truss became the first woman to hold either position and the first female lord chancellor in the thousand-year history of the office.
49.
Liz Truss herself said that he did not contact her before going public with his criticism, and she had never met or spoken to him.
50.
In November 2016, Liz Truss was further criticised, including by the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve and the Criminal Bar Association, for failing to support more robustly the judiciary and the principle of judicial independence, after three judges of the Divisional Court came under attack from politicians and from the Daily Mail for ruling against the government in R v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union.
51.
Lord Falconer, the former lord chancellor, who had previously suggested that, like her immediate predecessors Chris Grayling and Michael Gove, Liz Truss lacked the essential legal expertise that the constitution requires, called for her to be sacked as justice secretary as her perceived inadequate response "signals to the judges that they have lost their constitutional protector".
52.
In March 2017, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, told the House of Lords constitution select committee that Liz Truss was "completely and utterly wrong" to say she could not criticise the media and reiterated the importance of protecting judges.
53.
Liz Truss developed an enthusiasm for cultivating her presence on Twitter and Instagram.
54.
Liz Truss was closely involved in the launch of the free market campaign group, Freer.
55.
In June 2018, Liz Truss gave a speech outlining her declared commitment to freedom and individual liberty.
56.
In 2019, Liz Truss declared that she could be a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party to succeed May She ultimately elected not to stand, and instead endorsed Johnson.
57.
Twice in September 2019, Liz Truss said that the Department for International Trade had "inadvertently" allowed shipping of radio spares and an air cooler to Saudi Arabia in contravention of an order of the Court of Appeal, which found that UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia for use in the war in Yemen were unlawful.
58.
On 19 March 2020, Liz Truss introduced to Parliament the Trade Act 2021, which established the legal framework for the UK to conduct trade deals with nations around the world.
59.
On 7 July 2020, Liz Truss announced the lifting of a year-long ban on the export of arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia.
60.
Liz Truss undertook negotiations for a post-Brexit free trade agreement between the UK and Japan.
61.
In January 2022, the former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who serves on the international board of the China Development Bank, accused Liz Truss of making "demented" comments about Chinese military aggression in the Pacific, saying that "Britain suffers delusions of grandeur and relevance deprivation".
62.
Liz Truss was appointed in December 2021 as the British Government's chief negotiator with the EU, following the resignation of Lord Frost.
63.
Liz Truss's scheduled trip to Ukraine was cancelled after she tested positive for COVID-19 on 31 January 2022.
64.
On 6 February 2022, Liz Truss warned that "China must respect the Falklands' sovereignty" and defended the Falkland Islands as "part of the British family" after China backed Argentina's claim over islands.
65.
In October 2022, it was revealed that Liz Truss's phone was hacked during her service as the foreign minister with Russian spies under suspicion for the act.
66.
Liz Truss dismissed "demands to remove Russian troops from Russian territory" as "regrettable" and asked Truss if she recognised Russia's sovereignty over the Voronezh and Rostov regions, two Russian provinces where Russian troops were deployed.
67.
On 21 February 2022, Liz Truss condemned Russia's diplomatic recognition of two self-proclaimed separatist republics in the Donbas in Ukraine.
68.
Liz Truss stated that the British government would announce new sanctions against Russia.
69.
Boris Johnson's spokesperson later stated that British citizens should not travel to Ukraine to fight the Russians and dismissed a claim by the Kremlin that comments from Liz Truss prompted the nuclear alert.
70.
Liz Truss said the Russo-Ukrainian War could "last for years" and that it could mark the "beginning of the end" for Putin.
71.
Liz Truss wanted to push Russia's economy "back into the Soviet era".
72.
On 10 July 2022, Liz Truss announced her intention to run in the Conservative Party leadership election to replace Boris Johnson.
73.
Liz Truss pledged to cut taxes on day one if elected, and said she would "fight the election as a Conservative and govern as a Conservative", adding that she would take "immediate action to help people deal with the cost of living".
74.
Liz Truss said she would cancel a planned rise in corporation tax and reverse the recent increase in National Insurance rates, funded by delaying the date by which the national debt is planned to fall, as part of a "long-term plan to bring down the size of the state and the tax burden".
75.
Liz Truss finished second in the final MPs ballot, receiving 113 votes to Sunak's 137 votes.
76.
Liz Truss began appointing her cabinet and to other government positions on 6 September 2022.
77.
Liz Truss retained Ben Wallace as defence secretary, Alok Sharma as president for COP26, Alister Jack as Scotland secretary, Robert Buckland as Wales secretary, and James Heappey as minister of state for the armed forces and veterans.
78.
The mini-budget was criticised by the International Monetary Fund, US President Joe Biden, the opposition Labour Party and many within Liz Truss's party, including senior politicians Michael Gove and Grant Shapps.
79.
Liz Truss became the shortest-serving prime minister of the United Kingdom in history.
80.
Liz Truss said that she would remain in the House of Commons as a backbencher.
81.
Liz Truss is known for her economically liberal views and her support for free trade.
82.
Liz Truss founded the Free Enterprise Group of Conservative MPs, a pro-free market collection of parliamentarians arguing for a more entrepreneurial economy and fewer employment laws.
83.
Liz Truss replaced him with Jeremy Hunt, leading Faisal Islam of BBC News to write that "Trussonomics" is effectively dead.
84.
Liz Truss has called for Britain to reduce economic dependency on China and Russia and has supported certain diplomatic and economic sanctions imposed by the British government against China, including barring the Chinese ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang from entering Parliament, in response to China's retaliatory sanctions due to Xinjiang.
85.
Liz Truss accused Rishi Sunak of "seeking closer economic relations" with China.
86.
Liz Truss has been a strong supporter of Taiwan in the context of deteriorating cross strait relations, but, citing precedent, has said she would not visit the island nation if she was elected prime minister.
87.
Liz Truss described the Chinese government's treatment of the Uyghur people as "genocide".
88.
Liz Truss said she would continue to support Cyprus in its "efforts for reunification under international law and in helping find a peaceful and lasting solution" to the Cyprus conflict between Greek Cypriots and Turkish-backed Turkish Cypriot separatists.
89.
Liz Truss promised to "review" moving the British embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
90.
Liz Truss supported the United Kingdom's remaining in the European Union during the 2016 referendum.
91.
Liz Truss added that "some of the portents of doom didn't happen and instead we have actually unleashed new opportunities" after Brexit.
92.
On culture, Liz Truss has said that the Conservative Party should "reject the zero-sum game of identity politics, we reject the illiberalism of cancel culture, and we reject the soft bigotry of low expectations that holds so many people back".
93.
Liz Truss has suggested that Britain should not ignore the history of the British Empire, but should embrace the country's history "warts and all" if it is to compete with hostile states.
94.
In 2021, Liz Truss voted to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland and abstained from voting on the introduction of "buffer zones" outside of abortion clinics.
95.
Liz Truss spoke against gender self-identification, stating that "medical checks are important".
96.
Liz Truss said that she agreed that "only women have a cervix".
97.
Liz Truss stated that the government departments should withdraw from Stonewall's diversity champions scheme.
98.
Liz Truss signed the Conservative Environment Pledge on the website of the Conservative Environment Network, which has the support of 127 Conservative MPs.
99.
Liz Truss has proposed that solar panel use should be restricted to commercial roofs.
100.
Liz Truss has supported the construction of small modular reactors and large nuclear power facilities in different parts of the United Kingdom.
101.
In 2000, Liz Truss married Hugh O'Leary, a fellow accountant; the couple have two daughters.