LONDON, Oct 20 (NNN-XINHUA/AGENCIES) — Liz Truss, the prime minister of the United Kingdom (UK), resigned on Thursday.
With only a little over six weeks in office, she became the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history.
In a statement made in front of 10 Downing Street, she said there will be a leadership election “to be completed within the next week” and she will remain as caretaker prime minister until a successor has been chosen.
The Prime Minister’s reputation lay in tatters after a dramatic and tumultuous week in politics.
Mayhem in Westminster reached its climax last night in a crunch Commons vote on fracking, which saw a number of Tory backbenchers revolt, accusations of ministers screaming at MPs, and uncertainty as to whether senior Government members had resigned.
She added: “This morning I met the chairman of the 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady.
“We’ve agreed that there will be a leadership election to be completed within the next week.
“This will ensure that we remain on a path to deliver our fiscal plan and maintain our country’s economic stability and national security.”
The resignation makes Truss the UK’s shortest-serving Prime Minister in history. Her announcement this lunchtime that she was stepping down came after just 44 days in No10.
She bowed to pressure from her Tory MPs as the party’s popularity sunk to its lowest level ever with one poll suggesting they could be left with just one MP after an election.
Her authority started to collapse after her controversial mini-budget on Sept 23 panicked the financial markets.
She announced plans to cancel planned tax rises, introduced a two-year energy price guarantee, cut the basic rate of income tax to 19p and scrapped the 45p top rate of income tax.
However, the fiscal event sparked a collapse of the pound and a drop in stocks and shares undermining the safety of pension funds.
Within weeks she was forced to replace her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng with Jeremy Hunt who reversed almost all her policies and embarked on tax rises and spending cuts.
Defending her economic plans, she said as she resigned: “I came into office at a time of great economic and international instability.
“Families and businesses were worried about how to pay their bills, Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine threatens the security of our whole continent, and our country had been held back for too long by low economic growth.
“I was elected by the Conservative Party with a mandate to change this. We delivered on energy bills and on cutting national insurance and we set out a vision for a low tax, high growth economy – that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.”
Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 committee of Conservative MPs which determines the rules of leadership elections, visited the Prime Minister earlier today to let it be known that he had lost the confidence of her backbenchers.
Yesterday Truss had declared she was “a fighter, not a quitter” and even this morning her official spokesman was claiming she would fight the next general election. — NNN-XINHUA/AGENCIES
