LIZ Truss’s tenure as Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister comes to an end Tuesday, after 49 days in office, and Rishi Sunak’s premiership begins, as he picks up responsibility for Britain’s battered economy and deeply divided politics.
Truss will hold her last cabinet meeting and then make a statement outside 10 Downing Street around 10:15 a.m. local time, before officially submitting her resignation to King Charles III.
Sunak will follow her to Buckingham Palace and ask permission to form a government in a ceremony known as “kissing hands.”
Sunak will return to Downing Street around 11:35 a.m. and deliver his first remarks as prime minister – as the first person of colour and first Hindu to hold the role.
Truss lost the top job after just 49 days in office after she tried to cut taxes for high-earners and corporations without a plan to pay for it. Markets reeled, she backpedalled, but she could not save her premiership.
In a brief televised address on Monday, his first as Conservative Party leader, Sunak paid tribute to the “dignity and grace” of Truss – whose six-week tenure was an unprecedented disaster – and warned that Britain faced a “profound economic challenge.” In those few words, the sunny forecasts of a post-Brexit “Global Britain,” previously sold by Sunak and his predecessors, began to be grounded in new realities.
Sunak vowed to serve with “integrity and humility” – qualities he suggested were lacking when he resigned from Boris Johnson’s government and led a revolt against his former boss. He called for “stability and unity” — in other words, the opposite of the tumult and divisions that characterized Truss’s tenure.
Opposition politicians don’t appear to be leaving much leeway for a honeymoon period and they continued their calls for a general election. Labour lawmaker Angela Rayner complained that Sunak’s accession was a coronation and that the Tories could not “keep doling out prime ministers every month.” Labour leader Keir Starmer charged that Sunak was “covered in the mess” that 12 years of Conservative rule had created.
