Liz Truss

Biography

Mary Elizabeth Truss was born in 1975 and spent part of her childhood in Paisley, Scotland. She read philosophy, politics and economics at Merton College, Oxford, where she led the university's Liberal Democrats, before joining the Conservative Party in 1996. She then worked as an accountant at Shell and as an economic director at Cable & Wireless, and was deputy director of the think tank Reform.

After two failed attempts, she was elected MP for South West Norfolk in 2010 and co-founded the free-market Free Enterprise Group. She was an education minister from 2012, environment secretary from 2014, and in 2016 became the first woman to serve as Lord Chancellor; demoted to chief secretary to the Treasury in 2017, she returned to cabinet under Boris Johnson as trade secretary and then foreign secretary from 2021.

In September 2022 she beat Rishi Sunak for the Conservative leadership and became prime minister two days before Elizabeth II died. Her government's mini-budget of unfunded tax cuts unsettled financial markets and was largely reversed. Facing a revolt by her MPs, she announced her resignation on 20 October and left office on 25 October after 50 days, the shortest premiership in British history.

She lost her seat at the 2024 general election.