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UK prime minister Liz Truss resigned today as leader of the ruling Conservative Party just over six weeks into her premiership, marking the shortest period in office for a British leader.
In a statement outside the prime minister's official Downing Street residence, Truss said she was resigning because she cannot deliver the mandate on which she was elected by her party's members. An election to replace her will be completed within the next week. "This will ensure that we remain on a path to deliver our fiscal plans and maintain our country's economic stability and national security. I will remain as prime minister until a successor has been chosen," she said.
Truss' fiscal plans ended up being her undoing. A central pillar of her leadership campaign over the summer was a pledge to cut taxes. But when the cuts were announced in a "mini-budget" on 23 September, it sparked turmoil in the UK gilts and currency markets, forced the Bank of England to intervene with an emergency bond-buying programme and prompted a rebuke from the IMF.
The market reaction led Truss to fire her finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng. His successor, Jeremy Hunt, subsequently scrapped most of the tax cuts but this proved insufficient to quell a growing rebellion among Truss' own members of parliament (MPs), several of whom went on the record in recent days to call on her to quit. The resignation of her home secretary Suella Braverman yesterday, followed by chaotic scenes in parliament during a vote on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) for shale gas, sealed Truss' fate.
The focus has already switched to her successor. Hunt has ruled himself out of the running. Rishi Sunak — finance minister in Boris Johnson's administration and one of the final two in the last leadership contest — is being tipped as a contender, as is leader of the House of Commons Penny Mordaunt, also a leadership contender last time around. Even Boris Johnson may throw his hat in the ring, according to some UK newspaper reports.
Whoever becomes prime minister will have to decide which of Truss' policies to jettison. Among the government policies announced during her 45 days in charge is a package of measures designed to tackle high energy prices and improve the UK's energy security. The energy plan included lifting a moratorium on fracking for shale gas in England, launching a new North Sea oil and gas licensing round and fixing the energy retail price cap for a "typical" home at £2,500/yr ($2,816/yr) for two years.
The last of those three measures has since been watered down as part of new finance minister Hunt's attempts to restore the UK's fiscal credibility, with the energy price guarantee now only in place until April 2023. The other two measures are already in motion. The licensing round kicked off on 7 October and the fracking moratorium was lifted on 22 September, although there is opposition to the latter among many MPs. It is also not clear how fracking would go ahead in practice. The government said it would only happen in areas where there is clear local support, but no details on how this would be measured have been provided.
The opposition Labour Party tabled a vote in parliament yesterday to decide whether MPs should consider legislation to ban fracking. The motion was defeated by 96 votes, although there was some confusion among Conservative MPs about whether to treat it as a de facto confidence vote in the government.
