In the end, Liz Truss lasted less than seven weeks in the job. Never the first choice of Tory MPs, the decisions she made as prime minister finished her off at record pace.
She will be, by some distance, the United Kingdom’s shortest-ever serving prime minister. Her allies promised “shock and awe” when she entered Number 10, but few predicted that she would turn Westminster into such a disaster zone.
Today, there’s a collective sense of shock, rather like the aftermath of a car crash, where you emerge from the wreckage dazed and confused, asking yourself what just happened.
In the case of the Truss administration, the question is how on earth did the wheels come off the government so quickly and spectacularly? And what does that mean for the Conservative Party, our politics and the country now?
Sunak favourite to be new PM as Truss resigns – live politics updates
The central mistake of Liz Truss was to treat the business of government rather like a continuation of her election campaign. She made all sorts of promises to party members – on tax cuts and on spending commitments in order to win them over. When she entered Number 10, she didn’t recalibrate or compromise.
I remember the interview I did with her just days before her mini-budget at the top of the Empire State Building in New York when she told me, “I am prepared to be unpopular,” in order to push through her economic plan. She perhaps thought it was a show of strength. It turned out to be incredibly foolhardy.
It led to fatal errors that cost Ms Truss her job. Instead of consulting the markets, taking soundings from the Treasury, or even gauging the views of her cabinet properly, she and her then chancellor Kwasi Kwateng unleashed £45bn of unfunded tax cuts on the markets in a mini-budget that went even further than she had signalled in her leadership race.
I had thought when Ms Truss became prime minister, she might have stuck to commitments on tax cuts but staggered them in a way that might have been more palatable to the markets.
She did not, and she paid a heavy political price over the following weeks. Forced to U-turn on plans to scrap the 45p rate of tax, then sacking her chancellor before the incoming one, Jeremy Hunt, just about junked her entire economic plan. By Monday this week, it was clear that Liz Truss was a Prime Minister without a policy platform and out of control of her party.
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As Liz Truss resigns as prime minister, we take a look back on her political journey.
Read more:
Truss becomes shortest-serving PM in history
Who is in the running to replace Liz Truss?
Starmer calls for general election
But the British public was also paying the price for her reckless decisions, with interest rates rising faster than had been anticipated before that mini-budget amid a cost of living crisis in which inflation hit a record 40-year high in September.
She has become one of the UK’s most unpopular prime ministers in the space of just a few weeks – with just one in ten Britons satisfied with her leadership. An unrecoverable position, it was clear to me after that fateful press conference where Ms Truss sacked her chancellor that the game was up – what was less clear was how it would end.
That ending was accelerated by the chaos of the fracking vote on Thursday night. Ahead of that horror show, senior influential figures in the party had told me that there was no appetite to remove Ms Truss before the critical fiscal statement on October 31.
Pics: REUTERS/Henry Nicholls
They worried this could further unsettle markets: “The media mood I think is more febrile that the parliamentary mood,” one person familiar with the discussions of the 1922 committee told me soon after PMQs.
But that all changed after the evening of chaos, confusion of whips’ resignations and altercations in the voting lobbies between Conservative MPs.
“Everything that happened today could have been avoided, if it had been better managed,” remarked one wise former cabinet minister to me late on Wednesday night. “They didn’t have to create crisis points in terms of whipping votes. That they did is a symptom of where we are.”
But it did trigger a crisis – one which took a life of its own. As Boris Johnson said of his own infamous demise, “when the herd moves, it moves.” The momentum built and the party moved quickly. By Thursday lunchtime, Ms Truss announced she was out.
But the speed was also hastened not just by policy decisions but by politics. This was a prime minister who only ever had the public support of 42% of MPs, despite being nailed onto win for weeks.
It told us that Ms Truss was always going to have a problem winning over the parliamentary party, but instead of recognising her limitations and building a cabinet from different wings of the party, Ms Truss doubled down on winning power.
Rishi Sunak leaves his house in London
She kept Sunak supporters out of office and rewarded her allies. It meant that she was not sufficiently challenged by the cabinet in decision-making and failed to garner any goodwill from the wider parliamentary party.
There is also a view from those former cabinet ministers who were agitating from the outset that Ms Truss was never really up to the job in the first place. When her policy platform sparked such dire consequences, the public concluded that too. So she had to go.
But three prime ministers in four months and endless infighting – all during a cost of living crisis – is the worst possible advertisement of a party that wants to convince the public it is fit to lead the country.
Labour want a general election, calling the Conservatives a “coalition of chaos.” The public, meanwhile, are thoroughly fed up, with Labour now consistently polling 20 to 30 percentage points ahead of the Tories.
That is why 1992 chair Sir Graham Brady and the Conservative Party want to replace the prime minister within a week. It is an attempt to get on with the business of government and try to prove to the public that the Tories are capable of governing.
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Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer calls for a general election
But the mood in the party is desperate. Senior MPs tell me they think there’s little chance of winning the next general election, and the latest iteration of this Conservative psychodrama is designed not to win but to try to limit the losses.
So this will be a short, sharp contest with the aim of installing a new PM within the week. Nominations close on Monday at 2pm, and any candidate who wants to stand has to win 100 nominations. As things stand, it looks to me that the only two candidates that could reach the threshold are Rishi Sunak, who won 137 votes in the last contest, and Penny Mordaunt, who reached 105.
If only one of the candidates crosses the magic 100 threshold, we will know on Monday who will be the next prime minister. The party knows it’s on borrowed time with a fulminating public. This has to end, and soon.
“We are deeply conscious – its imperative in the national interest – in resolving this clearly and quickly,” Sir Graham told me this afternoon.
Labour want a general election, the Conservatives will resist. But the question that is first and foremost in my mind, after the second bout of vicious bloodletting in the Conservative Party in just four months, is whether MPs can come together behind whoever takes over?
Some think the divisions and the grievances are just too deep. The Johnsonites will never accept Rishi Sunak; the Sunakites rounded on Ms Truss and might round on the next leader too, should their man not take the crown. We will have a new prime minister, but its hard to see how it stops the rot.
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World
In the idyllic Cognac region of southern France, Trump’s tariffs threaten a centuries-old way of life
The impact of Trump’s tariffs is reaching deep into every economy.
We travelled into the French rural heartland, heading for Cognac – the home of French brandy.
It is only half the size of Surrey but its exports to America are worth €1bn a year and that trade is now severely threatened.
The first buds are out on the vines of Amy Pasquet’s vineyard.
An American, she has married into the industry and with her French husband owns JLP Cognac.
She knows more than most the bond brandy has formed between their two countries that goes back to the war.
Tariffs latest: Follow live updates
Ms Pasquet said: “A lot of the African-American soldiers had really loved their experience here and had brought back the cognac. And I think that stayed because this African-American community truly is a community and they want to drink like their grandfather did.”
The ties remain with rappers like Jay Z’s love for cognac.
However, Ms Pasquet adds: “There’s also this other community of people who have been drinking bourbon for a long time, love bourbon, but find the prices just outrageous today. So they want to try something different.”
Amy Pasquet owns JLP Cognac with her husband
JLP’s products were served at New York’s prestigious Met Gala.
They were preparing to launch new product lines in the US. But now that’s in doubt.
It is hard being an American in France now, Ms Pasquet says.
Her French neighbours are appalled by what US President Donald Trump is doing.
She continues: “They’re like, okay, America’s forgotten how close France and America are as far as (their) relationship is concerned. And I think that’s hurtful on both sides. I think it’s important to remember that the US is many things, and not just this one person, and there are millions of inhabitants that didn’t vote for him.”
A fresh challenge for a centuries-old tradition
Making cognac takes years, using techniques that go back centuries. In another vineyard we met Pierre Louis Giboin whose family have been doing it for more than 200 years.
In a cellar dating back to the French Revolution, barrels of oak sit under thick cobwebs, ageing the brandy.
The walls are lined with a unique black mould that thrives off the vapours of cognac.
They have seen threats come and go over those centuries, wars, weather, pestilence. But never from a country they regard as one of their oldest allies and best of customers.
Read more:
What China could do next as Trump’s tariff war
How tariffs will affect your money
Could Trump’s tariffs tip the world into recession?
Pierre Louis Giboin’s cellar dates back to the French revolution
Mr Trump’s tariffs, says Mr Giboin, now threaten a way of life.
“It’s at the end of like very good times in the Cognac region. It’s been like 10 years when everything’s been perfect, we have good harvest, we sell really easily all the stock, but now I mean it’s the end.”
Ms Pasquet and Mr Giboin are unusual.
Most cognac makers sell their produce through the drink’s four big houses, Hennessy, Remy Martin, Martell and Courvoisier.
Some have been told the amounts they can sell have been drastically reduced.
Independents though like them must find new markets if the tariff threat persists.
Confusion away from the chaos
Outside in the dappled light of a Cognac evening Mr Giboin and I toast glasses of pineau – the diluted form of cognac drunk as an aperitif.
In this idyllic corner of France, a world away from Washington, Mr Trump’s trade war on Europe simply makes no sense.
“He’s like angry against the whole world and the way he talks like that Europe the EU was made against the US to cheat on the US. It’s just crazy to think like this,” Mr Giboin says.
It’s not just what Mr Trump’s done. It’s how Europe now strikes back that concerns the French. And it’s not just in Cognac where they’re concerned
France exports more than €2bn worth of wine to America.
In the heart of the Bordeaux wine region, Sylvie Courselle’s family have been making wine since the 1940s at their Chateau Thieuley vineyard.
It’s bottling season but they can’t prepare the wine headed for America while everything is up in the air.
Showing me the unused reels of US labels for her wine she told me she was losing sleep over the uncertainty.
Later she was meeting with her American distributors.
Gerry Keogh sells Ms Courselle’s wine across the US.
He says the entire industry is reeling
Sylvie Courselle with distributers
The Chateau Thieuley vineyard in the Bordeaux wine region
“I think it’s like anything. You don’t really believe it’s happening. And even when you’re in the midst of it, it was kind of like 9/11.
“You’re like… This is actually happening. It’s unbelievable. And when you start seeing the repercussions from the stock market, et cetera, and how it’s impacting every level, it’s quite shocking.”
They know the crisis is far from over and could now escalate.
“We feel stuck in the middle of this commercial war and we don’t have the weapons to fight, I think,” Ms Courselle said.
It is, she says, very stressful.
Gerry Keogh
The histories of America and France have been intertwined for centuries through revolutions against tyranny and two wars fighting for liberty.
America used to call France its oldest ally, but under Donald Trump its now seen here as turning on France and the rest of Europe in a reckless and unjustified trade war.
It is all doing enormous harm to relations between the US and its European allies.
How Europe now decides to retaliate will help determine the extent of that damage.
World
In the idyllic Cognac region of southern France, Trump’s tariffs threaten a centuries-old way of life
The impact of Trump’s tariffs is reaching deep into every economy.
We travelled into the French rural heartland, heading for Cognac – the home of French brandy.
It is only half the size of Surrey but its exports to America are worth €1bn a year and that trade is now severely threatened.
The first buds are out on the vines of Amy Pasquet’s vineyard.
An American, she has married into the industry and with her French husband owns JLP Cognac.
She knows more than most the bond brandy has formed between their two countries that goes back to the war.
Tariffs latest: Follow live updates
Ms Pasquet said: “A lot of the African-American soldiers had really loved their experience here and had brought back the cognac. And I think that stayed because this African-American community truly is a community. and they want to drink like their grandfather did.”
The ties remain with rappers like Jay Z’s love for cognac.
However, Ms Pasquet adds: “There’s also this other community of people who have been drinking bourbon for a long time, love bourbon, but find the prices just outrageous today. So they want to try something different.”
Amy Pasquet owns JLP Cognac with her husband
JLP’s products were served at New York’s prestigious Met Gala.
They were preparing to launch new product lines in the US. But now that’s in doubt.
It is hard being an American in France now, Ms Pasquet says.
Her French neighbours are appalled by what US President Donald Trump is doing.
She continues: “They’re like, okay, America’s forgotten how close France and America are as far as (their) relationship is concerned. And I think that’s hurtful on both sides. I think it’s important to remember that the US is many things, and not just this one person, and there are millions of inhabitants that didn’t vote for him.”
A fresh challenge for a centuries-old tradition
Making cognac takes years, using techniques that go back centuries. In another vineyard we met Pierre Louis Giboin whose family have been doing it for more than 200 years.
In a cellar dating back to the French Revolution, barrels of oak sit under thick cobwebs, ageing the brandy.
The walls are lined with a unique black mould that thrives off the vapours of cognac.
They have seen threats come and go over those centuries, wars, weather, pestilence. But never from a country they regard as one of their oldest allies and best of customers.
Read more:
What China could do next as Trump’s tariff war
How tariffs will affect your money
Could Trump’s tariffs tip the world into recession?
Pierre Louis Giboin’s cellar dates back to the French revolution
Mr Trump’s tariffs, says Mr Giboin, now threaten a way of life.
“It’s at the end of like very good times in the Cognac region. It’s been like 10 years when everything’s been perfect, we have good harvest, we sell really easily all the stock, but now I mean it’s the end.”
Ms Pasquet and Mr Giboin are unusual.
Most cognac makers sell their produce through the drink’s four big houses, Hennessy, Remy Martin, Martell and Courvoisier.
Some have been told the amounts they can sell have been drastically reduced.
Independents though like them must find new markets if the tariff threat persists.
Confusion away from the chaos
Outside in the dappled light of a Cognac evening Mr Giboin and I toast glasses of pineau – the diluted form of cognac drunk as an aperitif.
In this idyllic corner of France, a world away from Washington, Mr Trump’s trade war on Europe simply makes no sense.
“He’s like angry against the whole world and the way he talks like that Europe the EU was made against the US to cheat on the US. It’s just crazy to think like this,” Mr Giboin says.
It’s not just what Mr Trump’s done. It’s how Europe now strikes back that concerns the French. And it’s not just in Cognac where they’re concerned
France exports more than €2bn worth of wine to America.
In the heart of the Bordeaux wine region, Sylvie Courselle’s family have been making wine since the 1940s at their Chateau Thieuley vineyard.
It’s bottling season but they can’t prepare the wine headed for America while everything is up in the air.
Showing me the unused reels of US labels for her wine she told me she was losing sleep over the uncertainty.
Later she was meeting with her American distributors.
Gerry Keogh sells Ms Courselle’s wine across the US.
He says the entire industry is reeling
Sylvie Courselle with distributers
The Chateau Thieuley vineyard in the Bordeaux wine region
“I think it’s like anything. You don’t really believe it’s happening. And even when you’re in the midst of it, it was kind of like 9/11.
“You’re like… This is actually happening. It’s unbelievable. And when you start seeing the repercussions from the stock market, et cetera, and how it’s impacting every level, it’s quite shocking.”
They know the crisis is far from over and could now escalate.
“We feel stuck in the middle of this commercial war and we don’t have the weapons to fight, I think,” Ms Courselle said.
It is, she says, very stressful.
Gerry Keogh
The histories of America and France have been intertwined for centuries through revolutions against tyranny and two wars fighting for liberty.
America used to call France its oldest ally, but under Mr Trump it is now being as turned on, as France, along with the rest of Europe, finds itself in what many would argue is a reckless and unjustified trade war.
It is all doing enormous harm to relations between the US and its European allies.
How Europe now decides to retaliate will help determine the extent of that damage.
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