69 Facts About Liz Truss

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.

Liz Truss studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Merton College, Oxford, and was the president of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats.

Liz Truss co-founded the Free Enterprise Group of Conservative MPs and wrote or co-wrote a number of papers and books, including After the Coalition and Britannia Unchained.

Liz Truss was the 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 a cabinet reshuffle.

In September 2022 Truss defeated Rishi Sunak in a leadership election to succeed Johnson, who had resigned because of an earlier government crisis, and was appointed as prime minister by Elizabeth II two days before the monarch's death; her government's business was suspended during a national mourning period of ten days.

Mary Elizabeth Truss was born on 26 July 1975 at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England.

Liz Truss was the second child of John and Priscilla Truss ; the year before Truss's birth, their first son, Matthew, had died.

Liz Truss later described her parents' politics as being "to the left of Labour"; her mother, a teacher and nurse, was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

When Liz Truss stood for election as a Conservative, her mother agreed to campaign with her but her father declined to do so.

When Liz Truss was 12 she and her family spent a year in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, where she attended Parkcrest Elementary School whilst her father taught at Simon Fraser University.

Liz Truss praised the Canadian curriculum and the attitude that it was "really good to be top of the class", which she contrasted with her education at Roundhay.

Liz Truss applied to Merton College but was instead pooled to the all-women's St Hilda's College; annoyed, she then complained to both colleges, after which she was accepted by Merton and began her studies there in September 1993.

Liz Truss read philosophy, politics and economics and graduated in 1996.

Liz Truss became the president of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats in her first year and a member of the national executive committee of Liberal Democrat Youth and Students in 1995.

However, by November 1995 Liz Truss had become critical of the Liberal Democrats, as she "realised the Tory Party was saying quite sane things"; in her last year at the university, she resigned from the LDYS.

From 1996 to 2000 Liz Truss worked for Royal Dutch Shell, living in Lewisham and Greenwich and qualifying as a chartered management accountant.

In January 2008, after losing her first two elections, Liz Truss became the deputy director of Reform, a centre-right think tank, where she advocated for more focus on countering serious and organised crime, higher standards in schools and action to tackle Britain's "falling competitiveness".

Liz Truss co-authored The Value of Mathematics, Fit for Purpose, A New Level, Back To Black and other reports.

Whilst working at Shell, Liz Truss served as the chair of the Lewisham Deptford Conservative Association from 1998 to 2000, having been introduced to the branch by her friend and later Conservative MP Jackie Doyle-Price.

Liz Truss unsuccessfully stood for election twice in Greenwich London Borough Council: for Vanbrugh ward in 1998 and Blackheath Westcombe in 2002.

At the 2001 general election Liz Truss was selected for the safe Labour seat of Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, coming a distant second but achieving a 3.2 per cent swing to the Conservatives, thought impressive by her party colleagues.

The election saw the Conservatives make a net gain of one seat, which was considered a disappointment; the party leader, William Hague, subsequently resigned, with Liz Truss supporting the former defence secretary Michael Portillo's unsuccessful leadership campaign.

Liz Truss, who was selected as the candidate for the seat, narrowly lost to the Labour incumbent after an active Conservative campaign which The Yorkshire Post described as "Blitzkrieg".

Liz Truss was elected as an MP in the 2010 general election, which saw 148 other Conservatives become MPs for the first time; many of what The Independent described as the "golden generation" would later reach high ranks in government.

In 2022 Liz Truss stated that the authors had each written a different chapter of the book; Raab had written the chapter which contained that claim.

Liz Truss soon became well known amongst members of Parliament in Norfolk for her frequent photo ops but was well respected amongst Conservative MPs, who recognised her as dedicated and hard-working, and by staff as attentive to local issues.

Liz Truss criticised "[giving] media studies the same value as further maths" and suggested in 2011 that students should have to sit GCSEs for "5 traditional academic subjects".

In September 2012 Liz Truss was appointed as parliamentary under-secretary of state for education and stepped back from the leadership of the FEG, with Kwarteng taking her place.

Liz Truss was pleased with her appointment, and praised Michael Gove, the secretary of state for the department; she formed a friendly rivalry with the future health secretary Matt Hancock.

Liz Truss announced proposals to reform A-levels by concentrating exams at the end of two-year courses and said that Britain should attempt to "out-educate" countries in Asia.

In July 2014 during a cabinet reshuffle, Liz Truss was appointed secretary of state at the department of environment, food and rural affairs ; the changes to the Cabinet made it one third women.

Liz Truss was originally to be made a minister of state, but Cameron changed his mind on the morning of the reshuffle.

Liz Truss was, along with the Treasury, keen to cut the budgets of bodies such as Natural England and the Environment Agency, placing them under stricter direct departmental control: Rory Stewart, one of Truss's junior ministers during her second term as environment secretary, claimed that she saw the department "very much in terms of budgets [and] cuts".

Under Liz Truss, Defra launched a ten-year strategy to counter falling bee populations, approved the limited temporary lifting of a European Union ban on the use of two neonicotinoid pesticides and cut subsidies for solar panels on agricultural land.

Four days after Liz Truss delivered the speech, parts of the video were featured on the satirical panel show Have I Got News For You; the awkward, stilted delivery led her to be mocked and clips of the speech went viral online.

In July 2016 Liz Truss was appointed as secretary of state for justice and lord chancellor in the first May ministry, becoming the first female lord chancellor in the office's thousand-year history.

Liz Truss denied that she had failed to defend them, writing:.

In June 2018 Liz Truss gave a speech criticising rules and regulations which she said "just g[ot] in the way of consumers' choices and lifestyles", including the government's efforts to reduce alcohol consumption and unhealthy eating habits, and warned that raising taxes could see the Conservatives being "crushed" at the polls.

Shortly after becoming international trade secretary, Liz Truss embarked on international trips to the US, New Zealand, Australia and Japan.

Liz Truss continued to document her trips through social media.

Liz Truss feared that she would be dismissed after the comments she had made on her previous international trips, but Johnson decided to keep her in post following Javid's resignation as chancellor.

Dominic Cummings, Johnson's chief adviser, later wrote that Liz Truss was "the only minister I shouted at in Number 10" because of her "compulsive pathological leaking".

Liz Truss became the second woman to occupy the office and kept the post of equalities minister.

Liz Truss supported a plan which declassified a large amount of intelligence on Russia, releasing it to the public for the first time in order to weaken the Russian government in the event of an invasion.

Liz Truss pledged to cut taxes, said she would "fight the election as a Conservative and govern as a Conservative" and would take "immediate action to help people deal with the cost of living".

Liz Truss said she would cancel a planned rise in corporation tax and reverse the increase in National Insurance rates, funded by delaying the date by which the national debt was planned to fall, as part of a "long-term plan to bring down the size of the state and the tax burden".

The political scientist Vernon Bogdanor said in a 2022 article that "[Liz Truss] appreciated that winning over the membership required not detailed policy proposals but the creation of a mood".

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.

Liz Truss's cabinet was composed almost entirely of those who had supported her during the leadership contest.

Liz Truss was told in the early morning that the Queen was unwell and likely to survive a "matter of hours, not days"; Truss ordered black clothes from her Greenwich home in anticipation of the Queen's death, as she had not yet had time to move her belongings to Westminster.

Liz Truss was the very spirit of Great Britain, and that spirit will endure.

The mini-budget was criticised by the International Monetary Fund, the American president, Joe Biden, the Labour Party and many within Liz Truss's party, including the senior politicians Michael Gove and Grant Shapps.

Hunt reversed many of the remaining policies announced in the mini-budget, leading to further instability; because of Liz Truss's perceived weakness, he was described by some Conservative MPs and newspapers as the prime minister.

Liz Truss was pilloried in national and international press as a u-turner, and a chaotic vote on fracking along with the resignation of Braverman as home secretary compounded a rapid deterioration of confidence in her leadership.

On 19 October, in response to a question by the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, Liz Truss said that she was a "fighter and not a quitter", quoting a 2001 phrase by Peter Mandelson.

At 1:35 pm, Liz Truss announced her resignation as the leader of the Conservative Party and as prime minister.

The short length of her premiership was the subject of much ridicule, including a livestream of a head of lettuce, started the week prior, which invited viewers to speculate whether Liz Truss would resign before the lettuce wilted.

Liz Truss was reselected as the Conservative candidate for South West Norfolk in February 2023 and in August that year, she submitted the list of her resignation honours, which were released in December to coincide with the 2024 New Year Honours.

That same month, Liz Truss gave a speech to the Institute for Government think tank in which she blamed "groupthink" amongst officials and the media for the collapse of her premiership.

The 2024 general election, held on 4 July, resulted in Liz Truss losing her seat, in which she was defending a majority of over 26,000, to the Labour challenger, Terry Jermy; the result was described as a Portillo moment by The Spectator, a right-leaning magazine.

Liz Truss has economically liberal views and supports free trade and deregulation.

In 2022 a video of a 19-year-old Liz Truss at the 1994 Liberal Democrat conference criticising the notion of people being "born to rule" resurfaced; in an interview with LBC during her leadership campaign, Liz Truss stated that "almost as soon as I made the speech, I regretted it".

In 2021 Liz Truss stated that the Conservatives should "reject the zero-sum game of identity politics, [reject] the illiberalism of cancel culture, and [reject] the soft bigotry of low expectations that holds so many people back".

Liz Truss voted to legalise same-sex marriage but has opposed the expansion of transgender rights.

Liz Truss spoke against gender self-identification, stating that "medical checks are important" and that "only women have a cervix".

Liz Truss called for Britain to reduce its economic dependency on China and Russia and supported certain diplomatic and economic sanctions imposed by the British government against the former.

Liz Truss has supported Taiwan in the context of deteriorating cross-strait relations but, citing precedent, refused to visit the island as prime minister and condemned the Chinese government's treatment of the Uyghur people as "genocide".

Liz Truss supported the United Kingdom remaining in the European Union during the 2016 referendum.

Since the referendum, Liz Truss has supported Brexit, and publicly stated in 2017 that she had changed her mind.