Liz Truss has resigned as Conservative Party leader and UK Prime Minister after just 45 days, becoming the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history.
“I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party,” Truss said in a very brief speech outside 10 Downing Street.
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“I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party.”
Her time in power will go down in history as the shortest tenure of any British Prime Minister.
Truss’s grip on power was so clearly tenuous that it prompted Britain’s Daily Star tabloid newspaper to ask, quite reasonably, whether her premiership would outlast the 10-day shelf life of an iceberg lettuce, off the back of a line in a leader by the Economist.
One week ago, the Daily Star launched a livestream which quickly became a viral phenomenon, showing a head of lettuce next to a portrait of the beleaguered Prime Minister. On Thursday, the lettuce, adorned with a blond wig, tiara, and beaming smile, was declared the victor. “This lettuce outlasted Liz Truss,” read the headline on the feed, while a ticker at the bottom of the feed promised the lettuce would make “a speech to the nation at a time TBC.” “Lettuce for PM?” read one of the many comments. “Long live the lettuce!”
Truss, the former Foreign Secretary, won the Conservative leadership election among MPs and party members earlier this year after the resignation of Boris Johnson.
But just weeks into her time in office, her new government’s plans to cut taxes for the wealthy and borrow more money sent the value of the British pound plummeting against the US dollar.
Against the backdrop of an existing cost-of-living crisis in the UK and surging energy bills, her popularity nosedived, and the opposition Labour Party surged in the polls.
Truss sacked her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng in a bid to regain control, but in the last week there have been other departures of Cabinet ministers and calls from her own MPs for her to quit.
There will now be a lightning-fast election of another Conservative Party leader to take over, leaving the UK with its third Prime Minister in a year. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is calling for a general election now, which officially would not have to be held until January 2025.
