On September 6th of 2022, Liz Truss walked through the doors of 10 Downing Street.
44 days later, she announced her resignation, becoming the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history.
In this episode, we look at where it all went wrong.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a lady called Liz Truss.
[00:00:27] If you had been taking a break from the news between September and October, you might not have any idea who this person was.
[00:00:35] She was, for a brief moment, the British Prime Minister.
[00:00:40] On September the 6th of 2022, she walked through the door of 10 Downing Street, becoming Prime Minister.
[00:00:47] But on October 20th, just 44 days later, she announced her resignation, and with it she became the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history.
[00:00:58] So, in this episode we are going to look at how it started, what actually happened in these tumultuous 44 days, and ask ourselves where it all went wrong.
[00:01:10] Ok then, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:13] I was born in 1987.
[00:01:16] When I was growing up, British politicians for me were serious, old men with grey hair and glasses.
[00:01:24] If you can picture a man called John Major, who was Prime Minister from 1990 until 1997, this is the vision of a British politician that people of my generation grew up with.
[00:01:39] And British politics was boring and uninteresting.
[00:01:43] Obviously, as a three-year-old, I wasn’t following it closely, but it certainly seemed boring.
[00:01:49] Sure, there was infighting, backstabbing, and crises of different sorts, but it all pales in comparison with the British politics of 30 years later, with the magazine The Economist publishing a front cover with the title Welcome to Britaly.
[00:02:08] There is no offence intended, of course, to any Italian listeners here, but rather to point out that the consistency and dullness of British politics has long gone, and the events of September and early October 2022 resembled something more out of a Netflix drama than real life.
[00:02:29] So, where did it all go wrong?
[00:02:33] First, we must look at how Liz Truss became Prime Minister in the first place. Then, we’ll look at her disastrous time in office, what went wrong and why, and now that this chaos is behind us, we can reflect on what the future holds.
[00:02:48] Ok then, so, how did Liz Truss become Prime Minister?
[00:02:52] There was no general election, the British public didn’t vote for her, so what was she doing in 10 Downing Street in the first place?
[00:03:02] Well, first I must explain a quirk, an unusual aspect, of the British political system. In the United Kingdom, people vote for their local members of parliament.
[00:03:14] These members of parliament, or MPs, normally belong to a political party. This political party elects its leader, and the leader of the political party with the most votes typically becomes Prime Minister.
[00:03:28] Importantly, we don’t directly vote for a Prime Minister, it’s different to the US system, for example.
[00:03:36] Now, why am I telling you this?
[00:03:39] It’s important because if a Prime Minister resigns when their party is still in power, there is no legal need for there to be another election.
[00:03:48] A new Prime Minister is elected by the party in power, first the MPs vote, and if the MPs can’t reach a conclusive judgement, it goes to a vote among the people who are members of that party.
[00:04:03] And this is exactly the situation that the UK found itself in on July the 7th of 2022 when Boris Johnson announced that he was going to resign as UK Prime Minister.
[00:04:17] Long story short, Boris Johnson’s tenure as Prime Minister was mired in controversy, from lying and cheating to his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
[00:04:29] The final nail in the coffin came when it was revealed that he knew that a senior politician had been accused of sexual misconduct and not only did he ignore the accusations and give him a job, but he then lied about it when asked directly.
[00:04:46] Even for a man dubbed “Teflon Boris”, because nothing would stick to him, this was too much.
[00:04:54] He announced his resignation, and this was then followed by an almost two-month campaign to choose the next prime minister of the party in power, the Conservative Party, and therefore the next British Prime Minister.
[00:05:07] There were eight different candidates for the job, and the Conservative party was split.
[00:05:14] The early frontrunner was a man called Rishi Sunak, who had been the Chancellor of the Exchequer, essentially the Minister of Finance.
[00:05:24] But he was seen by many allies of Boris Johnson to have betrayed Johnson, and he was also seen by many members of the public to be too confident in the fact that the job would be his.
[00:05:38] Without getting too caught up in the details of British politics, the Conservative party has a wide range of beliefs, from people like Sunak who are closer to the centre, right through to people on the very far right wing.
[00:05:53] One such person was a then 46-year-old lady called Liz Truss.
[00:05:59] She was a key ally of Boris Johnson, and had been his Foreign Secretary since 2021.
[00:06:07] After many weeks of political campaigning, practically the whole summer, only two candidates were left in the running to become the leader of the Conservative party: Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.
[00:06:20] Because neither candidate could get sufficient support from MPs, there was a vote by members of the Conservative party, the 150,000 or so people who pay membership fees to be part of the Conservative party.
[00:06:35] These people were predominantly older, white people living outside major cities, living in the countryside in the south of the country.
[00:06:45] To be precise, over half were aged over 60, 97% were white, and they were overwhelmingly based in Southern England.
[00:06:56] And it was this group of 150,000 that voted for the next leader of the party, and therefore the next Prime Minister.
[00:07:05] So on September 6th, after a tediously long campaign, Liz Truss was announced as the winner, beating Sunak with 57.4% of the vote to his 42.6%. Why am I going into such detail here?
[00:07:22] Well, the point to reiterate is that an absolutely tiny percentage of the country voted for Liz Truss. Less than a hundred thousand people out of a voting population of almost 50 million, it’s less than 0.2%.
[00:07:38] And her leadership campaign had deeply divided the already divided Conservative party.
[00:07:45] So, when she walked through the door of 10 Downing Street, the home of the British Prime Minister, on September 6th, she was doing so with minimal public support and as the leader of a divided party.
[00:07:59] It was always going to be an uphill battle.
[00:08:03] So, what actually happened?
[00:08:05] Well, this story only lasts 44 days, but they were certainly eventful.
[00:08:12] Liz Truss went to meet the Queen, as is customary for a new Prime Minister.
[00:08:17] Within 48 hours the queen was dead.
[00:08:21] Clearly, I’m not blaming Liz Truss, but it was an ominous start.
[00:08:26] And while Liz Truss can’t be faulted for the death of a 96-year-old woman, the rest of her demise was almost entirely self-inflicted, it was unnecessary and it was her fault.
[00:08:40] So, where to begin.
[00:08:42] Well, it all started to go wrong on September the 23rd, as she was only in her third week in the role.
[00:08:50] Her Chancellor of the Exchequer and close ally, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a “mini budget”.
[00:08:58] Traditionally in British politics, a Chancellor announces a new budget in the spring.
[00:09:05] But Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng decided to announce a new “mini budget” almost as soon as they were in power.
[00:09:13] It was, in theory, in reaction to the energy and cost-of-living crisis that was plaguing the UK, and was intended to provide a blueprint for their vision of the stagnant British economy.
[00:09:27] Kwasi Kwarteng stood up in Parliament and made his announcement.
[00:09:33] He announced a series of tax cuts, especially for the highest earners, those earning over £150,000 a year.
[00:09:41] These tax cuts would cost the country £45 billion.
[00:09:47] The idea behind it, which was a key part of his and Liz Truss’s philosophy about how to stimulate the British economy, was that by reducing taxes and government interference, the size of the state essentially, the country would become more attractive to business, and in turn the economy would grow.
[00:10:07] This wasn’t some great secret that he and Liz Truss had kept, and they “surprised” the country by announcing it.
[00:10:14] The pair of them had literally written a book on exactly this back in 2012 called “Britannia Unchained”, which set out their vision for a low-tax British economy.
[00:10:28] And Truss had talked extensively about this during her campaign to be party leader.
[00:10:34] Now was Truss and Kwarteng’s time to test out their plan, to finally unchain the UK from the shackles of high taxes and low productivity.
[00:10:46] Unfortunately, it did not go as planned.
[00:10:49] The financial markets did not react in the way that Kwarteng and Truss had hoped.
[00:10:55] The value of the British pound dropped immediately after the budget announcement, reaching an all-time record low against the US dollar.
[00:11:05] The cost of borrowing skyrocketed, people in the UK trying to get mortgages suddenly found that the interest rates had doubled or tripled and their dream house was now out of reach.
[00:11:19] The Bank of England was forced to intervene and buy £65 billion in government bonds.
[00:11:27] Now, this isn’t a show about business or finance, so we aren’t going to go into the exact details, but the point is that this announcement was very poorly received by the world of business and it ended up costing the country literally billions of pounds.
[00:11:44] And Liz Truss saw her popularity ratings go the way of the British pound, this already unpopular Prime Minister became public enemy number one.
[00:11:56] She was pressured to reverse the announcement, or at least asked to set out a plan for how these massive tax cuts were going to be paid for.
[00:12:05] Yet she did not, instead promising to continue with her plan, not apologising or accepting in the slightest that she bore some responsibility for the chaos.
[00:12:18] She did make one concession, which was to sack her close ally and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, which she did on the 14th of October, after it became clear that she needed to do something.
[00:12:31] He was replaced by a more moderate politician, a man called Jeremy Hunt, who quickly reversed some of the major tax cuts that Kwarteng and Truss had called for.
[00:12:43] By now, there were plenty of people calling for Liz Truss to go and newspaper articles with headlines like “What is the point of Liz Truss?”
[00:12:53] Her entire political philosophy was one of low taxes and shrinking the state, and if she had completely reversed, gone back on this policy, what was the point of her being Prime Minister in the first place?
[00:13:08] One British tabloid newspaper, called The Daily Star, even set up a live video feed with a picture of Liz Truss next to a real lettuce, asking its readers the question of who would last longer, the lettuce or the British Prime Minister.
[00:13:24] This was on October 14th.
[00:13:27] Unfortunately, the next week would get even worse for Liz Truss.
[00:13:32] She was doing absolutely terribly in opinion polls, with a dismal 9% of the country thinking that she was doing a good job, and predicting that if there was an election tomorrow, the Conservatives would lose the vast majority of their seats.
[00:13:49] It was crisis time.
[00:13:51] Although she was incredibly unpopular, the rules of the Conservative Party mean that nobody can challenge a leader for 12 months after a leadership contest.
[00:14:02] So what happened was a growing number of Conservative MPs started to voice their lack of confidence in her, both formally and informally, on and off the record.
[00:14:14] And at the same time the Labour party started putting pressure on the Conservative government to call a general election, an election that Labour was almost guaranteed to win if Truss was still leader of the Conservatives.
[00:14:29] If things had been bad for Truss after the crashing of the pound and the loss of her closest ally, things were about to get much worse.
[00:14:39] And there were two real nails in the coffin.
[00:14:43] Firstly, on October the 19th her Home Secretary was forced to resign after being found to have used a personal email for government business, and in her resignation letter - which was made public - she was highly critical of Liz Truss.
[00:15:01] Then later that day there was a chaotic vote on whether to ban fracking, the mining technique, with some Conservative MPs being accused of being bullied into voting with the government.
[00:15:15] For many Conservative MPs, enough was enough.
[00:15:20] Here’s a short clip of an interview with a senior MP called Charles Walker where he explains the mood.
[00:15:28] /
[00:15:28] Charles Walker: This whole affair is inexcusable. It, it is just, it is pitiful reflection on the conservative parliamentary party at every level. This is absolute disgrace.
[00:15:40] As a tory MP of 17 years who's never been a minister who's got on with it loyally most of the time. I think it's a shambles and a disgrace. I think it is utterly appalling.
[00:15:53] I'm, I'm livid, and I really shouldn't say this, but I hope all those people that put Liz Truss in number 10. I hope it was worth it. I hope it was worth it for the ministry or red box. I hope it was worth it to sit around the cabinet table because the damage they have done to our party is extraordinary.
[00:16:11] Alastair Budge: Enough was enough.
[00:16:14] The following day, just 44 days after she had taken the job, and with record-breaking levels of unpopularity and absolutely no way out, Liz Truss announced that she would resign as British Prime Minister.
[00:16:30] She was, indeed, beaten by the lettuce.
[00:16:34] There were calls for a general election by the Labour Party, with critics pointing out that the Conservatives needed to give the British people the chance to choose their next Prime Minister.
[00:16:45] The choice didn’t go to the British people, and the leadership contest was thankfully much shorter than the one in the summer.
[00:16:55] It took just four days, and Rishi Sunak received enough votes from MPs to be elected party leader, and therefore Prime Minister.
[00:17:05] To date, at least, Sunak’s tenure as Prime Minister has been refreshingly boring and uneventful compared to the chaos of his predecessor.
[00:17:15] He has unwound many of Truss’s pledges, although he is the leader of a deeply divided and still deeply unpopular party.
[00:17:24] And his challenge is two-fold.
[00:17:27] Firstly, and this is of course the primary challenge, to deal with the many crises plaguing the United Kingdom, from less avoidable crises such as the energy and cost-of-living crisis through to the completely self-inflicted crisis of reversing the economic damage of Liz Truss’s 44 days in charge.
[00:17:47] But secondly, his job is to rebuild some of the public trust in the Conservative party that was completely destroyed by Liz Truss.
[00:17:58] The Conservative party’s core message to the British public has been for a long time that it is fiscally responsible, that it is the party that knows how to manage public spending and the economy, yet Liz Truss’s 44 days in office have done what many commentators have said to be irreparable damage to this.
[00:18:20] Fortunately for the Conservatives, the resignation of Liz Truss gave them an immediate bump in the polls, with Rishi Sunak seen as a more moderate and more competent candidate than his predecessor.
[00:18:34] Sunak has until January of 2025 to call a general election, he has two years to rebuild trust and patch up the damage from the most chaotic period of recent British political history.
[00:18:48] It’s a monumental task that he has ahead of him, and all that remains to be said is let’s check in again in a couple of years and see whether he manages it.
[00:19:01] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Liz Truss, the 44-Day Prime Minister.
[00:19:07] I imagine that you might have been aware of some of the chaos that took place when she was Prime Minister, but I hope that this has shed some light on it, and provided a bit of explanation about what exactly went wrong.
[00:19:20] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:24] How was this news covered in your country?
[00:19:26] How has this changed your perception of British politicians, or of the UK as a country?
[00:19:32] Do you think that Rishi Sunak will manage to undo the damage caused by Liz Truss?
[00:19:37] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:41] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:49] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:53] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a lady called Liz Truss.
[00:00:27] If you had been taking a break from the news between September and October, you might not have any idea who this person was.
[00:00:35] She was, for a brief moment, the British Prime Minister.
[00:00:40] On September the 6th of 2022, she walked through the door of 10 Downing Street, becoming Prime Minister.
[00:00:47] But on October 20th, just 44 days later, she announced her resignation, and with it she became the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history.
[00:00:58] So, in this episode we are going to look at how it started, what actually happened in these tumultuous 44 days, and ask ourselves where it all went wrong.
[00:01:10] Ok then, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:13] I was born in 1987.
[00:01:16] When I was growing up, British politicians for me were serious, old men with grey hair and glasses.
[00:01:24] If you can picture a man called John Major, who was Prime Minister from 1990 until 1997, this is the vision of a British politician that people of my generation grew up with.
[00:01:39] And British politics was boring and uninteresting.
[00:01:43] Obviously, as a three-year-old, I wasn’t following it closely, but it certainly seemed boring.
[00:01:49] Sure, there was infighting, backstabbing, and crises of different sorts, but it all pales in comparison with the British politics of 30 years later, with the magazine The Economist publishing a front cover with the title Welcome to Britaly.
[00:02:08] There is no offence intended, of course, to any Italian listeners here, but rather to point out that the consistency and dullness of British politics has long gone, and the events of September and early October 2022 resembled something more out of a Netflix drama than real life.
[00:02:29] So, where did it all go wrong?
[00:02:33] First, we must look at how Liz Truss became Prime Minister in the first place. Then, we’ll look at her disastrous time in office, what went wrong and why, and now that this chaos is behind us, we can reflect on what the future holds.
[00:02:48] Ok then, so, how did Liz Truss become Prime Minister?
[00:02:52] There was no general election, the British public didn’t vote for her, so what was she doing in 10 Downing Street in the first place?
[00:03:02] Well, first I must explain a quirk, an unusual aspect, of the British political system. In the United Kingdom, people vote for their local members of parliament.
[00:03:14] These members of parliament, or MPs, normally belong to a political party. This political party elects its leader, and the leader of the political party with the most votes typically becomes Prime Minister.
[00:03:28] Importantly, we don’t directly vote for a Prime Minister, it’s different to the US system, for example.
[00:03:36] Now, why am I telling you this?
[00:03:39] It’s important because if a Prime Minister resigns when their party is still in power, there is no legal need for there to be another election.
[00:03:48] A new Prime Minister is elected by the party in power, first the MPs vote, and if the MPs can’t reach a conclusive judgement, it goes to a vote among the people who are members of that party.
[00:04:03] And this is exactly the situation that the UK found itself in on July the 7th of 2022 when Boris Johnson announced that he was going to resign as UK Prime Minister.
[00:04:17] Long story short, Boris Johnson’s tenure as Prime Minister was mired in controversy, from lying and cheating to his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
[00:04:29] The final nail in the coffin came when it was revealed that he knew that a senior politician had been accused of sexual misconduct and not only did he ignore the accusations and give him a job, but he then lied about it when asked directly.
[00:04:46] Even for a man dubbed “Teflon Boris”, because nothing would stick to him, this was too much.
[00:04:54] He announced his resignation, and this was then followed by an almost two-month campaign to choose the next prime minister of the party in power, the Conservative Party, and therefore the next British Prime Minister.
[00:05:07] There were eight different candidates for the job, and the Conservative party was split.
[00:05:14] The early frontrunner was a man called Rishi Sunak, who had been the Chancellor of the Exchequer, essentially the Minister of Finance.
[00:05:24] But he was seen by many allies of Boris Johnson to have betrayed Johnson, and he was also seen by many members of the public to be too confident in the fact that the job would be his.
[00:05:38] Without getting too caught up in the details of British politics, the Conservative party has a wide range of beliefs, from people like Sunak who are closer to the centre, right through to people on the very far right wing.
[00:05:53] One such person was a then 46-year-old lady called Liz Truss.
[00:05:59] She was a key ally of Boris Johnson, and had been his Foreign Secretary since 2021.
[00:06:07] After many weeks of political campaigning, practically the whole summer, only two candidates were left in the running to become the leader of the Conservative party: Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.
[00:06:20] Because neither candidate could get sufficient support from MPs, there was a vote by members of the Conservative party, the 150,000 or so people who pay membership fees to be part of the Conservative party.
[00:06:35] These people were predominantly older, white people living outside major cities, living in the countryside in the south of the country.
[00:06:45] To be precise, over half were aged over 60, 97% were white, and they were overwhelmingly based in Southern England.
[00:06:56] And it was this group of 150,000 that voted for the next leader of the party, and therefore the next Prime Minister.
[00:07:05] So on September 6th, after a tediously long campaign, Liz Truss was announced as the winner, beating Sunak with 57.4% of the vote to his 42.6%. Why am I going into such detail here?
[00:07:22] Well, the point to reiterate is that an absolutely tiny percentage of the country voted for Liz Truss. Less than a hundred thousand people out of a voting population of almost 50 million, it’s less than 0.2%.
[00:07:38] And her leadership campaign had deeply divided the already divided Conservative party.
[00:07:45] So, when she walked through the door of 10 Downing Street, the home of the British Prime Minister, on September 6th, she was doing so with minimal public support and as the leader of a divided party.
[00:07:59] It was always going to be an uphill battle.
[00:08:03] So, what actually happened?
[00:08:05] Well, this story only lasts 44 days, but they were certainly eventful.
[00:08:12] Liz Truss went to meet the Queen, as is customary for a new Prime Minister.
[00:08:17] Within 48 hours the queen was dead.
[00:08:21] Clearly, I’m not blaming Liz Truss, but it was an ominous start.
[00:08:26] And while Liz Truss can’t be faulted for the death of a 96-year-old woman, the rest of her demise was almost entirely self-inflicted, it was unnecessary and it was her fault.
[00:08:40] So, where to begin.
[00:08:42] Well, it all started to go wrong on September the 23rd, as she was only in her third week in the role.
[00:08:50] Her Chancellor of the Exchequer and close ally, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a “mini budget”.
[00:08:58] Traditionally in British politics, a Chancellor announces a new budget in the spring.
[00:09:05] But Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng decided to announce a new “mini budget” almost as soon as they were in power.
[00:09:13] It was, in theory, in reaction to the energy and cost-of-living crisis that was plaguing the UK, and was intended to provide a blueprint for their vision of the stagnant British economy.
[00:09:27] Kwasi Kwarteng stood up in Parliament and made his announcement.
[00:09:33] He announced a series of tax cuts, especially for the highest earners, those earning over £150,000 a year.
[00:09:41] These tax cuts would cost the country £45 billion.
[00:09:47] The idea behind it, which was a key part of his and Liz Truss’s philosophy about how to stimulate the British economy, was that by reducing taxes and government interference, the size of the state essentially, the country would become more attractive to business, and in turn the economy would grow.
[00:10:07] This wasn’t some great secret that he and Liz Truss had kept, and they “surprised” the country by announcing it.
[00:10:14] The pair of them had literally written a book on exactly this back in 2012 called “Britannia Unchained”, which set out their vision for a low-tax British economy.
[00:10:28] And Truss had talked extensively about this during her campaign to be party leader.
[00:10:34] Now was Truss and Kwarteng’s time to test out their plan, to finally unchain the UK from the shackles of high taxes and low productivity.
[00:10:46] Unfortunately, it did not go as planned.
[00:10:49] The financial markets did not react in the way that Kwarteng and Truss had hoped.
[00:10:55] The value of the British pound dropped immediately after the budget announcement, reaching an all-time record low against the US dollar.
[00:11:05] The cost of borrowing skyrocketed, people in the UK trying to get mortgages suddenly found that the interest rates had doubled or tripled and their dream house was now out of reach.
[00:11:19] The Bank of England was forced to intervene and buy £65 billion in government bonds.
[00:11:27] Now, this isn’t a show about business or finance, so we aren’t going to go into the exact details, but the point is that this announcement was very poorly received by the world of business and it ended up costing the country literally billions of pounds.
[00:11:44] And Liz Truss saw her popularity ratings go the way of the British pound, this already unpopular Prime Minister became public enemy number one.
[00:11:56] She was pressured to reverse the announcement, or at least asked to set out a plan for how these massive tax cuts were going to be paid for.
[00:12:05] Yet she did not, instead promising to continue with her plan, not apologising or accepting in the slightest that she bore some responsibility for the chaos.
[00:12:18] She did make one concession, which was to sack her close ally and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, which she did on the 14th of October, after it became clear that she needed to do something.
[00:12:31] He was replaced by a more moderate politician, a man called Jeremy Hunt, who quickly reversed some of the major tax cuts that Kwarteng and Truss had called for.
[00:12:43] By now, there were plenty of people calling for Liz Truss to go and newspaper articles with headlines like “What is the point of Liz Truss?”
[00:12:53] Her entire political philosophy was one of low taxes and shrinking the state, and if she had completely reversed, gone back on this policy, what was the point of her being Prime Minister in the first place?
[00:13:08] One British tabloid newspaper, called The Daily Star, even set up a live video feed with a picture of Liz Truss next to a real lettuce, asking its readers the question of who would last longer, the lettuce or the British Prime Minister.
[00:13:24] This was on October 14th.
[00:13:27] Unfortunately, the next week would get even worse for Liz Truss.
[00:13:32] She was doing absolutely terribly in opinion polls, with a dismal 9% of the country thinking that she was doing a good job, and predicting that if there was an election tomorrow, the Conservatives would lose the vast majority of their seats.
[00:13:49] It was crisis time.
[00:13:51] Although she was incredibly unpopular, the rules of the Conservative Party mean that nobody can challenge a leader for 12 months after a leadership contest.
[00:14:02] So what happened was a growing number of Conservative MPs started to voice their lack of confidence in her, both formally and informally, on and off the record.
[00:14:14] And at the same time the Labour party started putting pressure on the Conservative government to call a general election, an election that Labour was almost guaranteed to win if Truss was still leader of the Conservatives.
[00:14:29] If things had been bad for Truss after the crashing of the pound and the loss of her closest ally, things were about to get much worse.
[00:14:39] And there were two real nails in the coffin.
[00:14:43] Firstly, on October the 19th her Home Secretary was forced to resign after being found to have used a personal email for government business, and in her resignation letter - which was made public - she was highly critical of Liz Truss.
[00:15:01] Then later that day there was a chaotic vote on whether to ban fracking, the mining technique, with some Conservative MPs being accused of being bullied into voting with the government.
[00:15:15] For many Conservative MPs, enough was enough.
[00:15:20] Here’s a short clip of an interview with a senior MP called Charles Walker where he explains the mood.
[00:15:28] /
[00:15:28] Charles Walker: This whole affair is inexcusable. It, it is just, it is pitiful reflection on the conservative parliamentary party at every level. This is absolute disgrace.
[00:15:40] As a tory MP of 17 years who's never been a minister who's got on with it loyally most of the time. I think it's a shambles and a disgrace. I think it is utterly appalling.
[00:15:53] I'm, I'm livid, and I really shouldn't say this, but I hope all those people that put Liz Truss in number 10. I hope it was worth it. I hope it was worth it for the ministry or red box. I hope it was worth it to sit around the cabinet table because the damage they have done to our party is extraordinary.
[00:16:11] Alastair Budge: Enough was enough.
[00:16:14] The following day, just 44 days after she had taken the job, and with record-breaking levels of unpopularity and absolutely no way out, Liz Truss announced that she would resign as British Prime Minister.
[00:16:30] She was, indeed, beaten by the lettuce.
[00:16:34] There were calls for a general election by the Labour Party, with critics pointing out that the Conservatives needed to give the British people the chance to choose their next Prime Minister.
[00:16:45] The choice didn’t go to the British people, and the leadership contest was thankfully much shorter than the one in the summer.
[00:16:55] It took just four days, and Rishi Sunak received enough votes from MPs to be elected party leader, and therefore Prime Minister.
[00:17:05] To date, at least, Sunak’s tenure as Prime Minister has been refreshingly boring and uneventful compared to the chaos of his predecessor.
[00:17:15] He has unwound many of Truss’s pledges, although he is the leader of a deeply divided and still deeply unpopular party.
[00:17:24] And his challenge is two-fold.
[00:17:27] Firstly, and this is of course the primary challenge, to deal with the many crises plaguing the United Kingdom, from less avoidable crises such as the energy and cost-of-living crisis through to the completely self-inflicted crisis of reversing the economic damage of Liz Truss’s 44 days in charge.
[00:17:47] But secondly, his job is to rebuild some of the public trust in the Conservative party that was completely destroyed by Liz Truss.
[00:17:58] The Conservative party’s core message to the British public has been for a long time that it is fiscally responsible, that it is the party that knows how to manage public spending and the economy, yet Liz Truss’s 44 days in office have done what many commentators have said to be irreparable damage to this.
[00:18:20] Fortunately for the Conservatives, the resignation of Liz Truss gave them an immediate bump in the polls, with Rishi Sunak seen as a more moderate and more competent candidate than his predecessor.
[00:18:34] Sunak has until January of 2025 to call a general election, he has two years to rebuild trust and patch up the damage from the most chaotic period of recent British political history.
[00:18:48] It’s a monumental task that he has ahead of him, and all that remains to be said is let’s check in again in a couple of years and see whether he manages it.
[00:19:01] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Liz Truss, the 44-Day Prime Minister.
[00:19:07] I imagine that you might have been aware of some of the chaos that took place when she was Prime Minister, but I hope that this has shed some light on it, and provided a bit of explanation about what exactly went wrong.
[00:19:20] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:24] How was this news covered in your country?
[00:19:26] How has this changed your perception of British politicians, or of the UK as a country?
[00:19:32] Do you think that Rishi Sunak will manage to undo the damage caused by Liz Truss?
[00:19:37] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:41] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:49] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:53] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:12] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a lady called Liz Truss.
[00:00:27] If you had been taking a break from the news between September and October, you might not have any idea who this person was.
[00:00:35] She was, for a brief moment, the British Prime Minister.
[00:00:40] On September the 6th of 2022, she walked through the door of 10 Downing Street, becoming Prime Minister.
[00:00:47] But on October 20th, just 44 days later, she announced her resignation, and with it she became the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history.
[00:00:58] So, in this episode we are going to look at how it started, what actually happened in these tumultuous 44 days, and ask ourselves where it all went wrong.
[00:01:10] Ok then, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:13] I was born in 1987.
[00:01:16] When I was growing up, British politicians for me were serious, old men with grey hair and glasses.
[00:01:24] If you can picture a man called John Major, who was Prime Minister from 1990 until 1997, this is the vision of a British politician that people of my generation grew up with.
[00:01:39] And British politics was boring and uninteresting.
[00:01:43] Obviously, as a three-year-old, I wasn’t following it closely, but it certainly seemed boring.
[00:01:49] Sure, there was infighting, backstabbing, and crises of different sorts, but it all pales in comparison with the British politics of 30 years later, with the magazine The Economist publishing a front cover with the title Welcome to Britaly.
[00:02:08] There is no offence intended, of course, to any Italian listeners here, but rather to point out that the consistency and dullness of British politics has long gone, and the events of September and early October 2022 resembled something more out of a Netflix drama than real life.
[00:02:29] So, where did it all go wrong?
[00:02:33] First, we must look at how Liz Truss became Prime Minister in the first place. Then, we’ll look at her disastrous time in office, what went wrong and why, and now that this chaos is behind us, we can reflect on what the future holds.
[00:02:48] Ok then, so, how did Liz Truss become Prime Minister?
[00:02:52] There was no general election, the British public didn’t vote for her, so what was she doing in 10 Downing Street in the first place?
[00:03:02] Well, first I must explain a quirk, an unusual aspect, of the British political system. In the United Kingdom, people vote for their local members of parliament.
[00:03:14] These members of parliament, or MPs, normally belong to a political party. This political party elects its leader, and the leader of the political party with the most votes typically becomes Prime Minister.
[00:03:28] Importantly, we don’t directly vote for a Prime Minister, it’s different to the US system, for example.
[00:03:36] Now, why am I telling you this?
[00:03:39] It’s important because if a Prime Minister resigns when their party is still in power, there is no legal need for there to be another election.
[00:03:48] A new Prime Minister is elected by the party in power, first the MPs vote, and if the MPs can’t reach a conclusive judgement, it goes to a vote among the people who are members of that party.
[00:04:03] And this is exactly the situation that the UK found itself in on July the 7th of 2022 when Boris Johnson announced that he was going to resign as UK Prime Minister.
[00:04:17] Long story short, Boris Johnson’s tenure as Prime Minister was mired in controversy, from lying and cheating to his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
[00:04:29] The final nail in the coffin came when it was revealed that he knew that a senior politician had been accused of sexual misconduct and not only did he ignore the accusations and give him a job, but he then lied about it when asked directly.
[00:04:46] Even for a man dubbed “Teflon Boris”, because nothing would stick to him, this was too much.
[00:04:54] He announced his resignation, and this was then followed by an almost two-month campaign to choose the next prime minister of the party in power, the Conservative Party, and therefore the next British Prime Minister.
[00:05:07] There were eight different candidates for the job, and the Conservative party was split.
[00:05:14] The early frontrunner was a man called Rishi Sunak, who had been the Chancellor of the Exchequer, essentially the Minister of Finance.
[00:05:24] But he was seen by many allies of Boris Johnson to have betrayed Johnson, and he was also seen by many members of the public to be too confident in the fact that the job would be his.
[00:05:38] Without getting too caught up in the details of British politics, the Conservative party has a wide range of beliefs, from people like Sunak who are closer to the centre, right through to people on the very far right wing.
[00:05:53] One such person was a then 46-year-old lady called Liz Truss.
[00:05:59] She was a key ally of Boris Johnson, and had been his Foreign Secretary since 2021.
[00:06:07] After many weeks of political campaigning, practically the whole summer, only two candidates were left in the running to become the leader of the Conservative party: Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss.
[00:06:20] Because neither candidate could get sufficient support from MPs, there was a vote by members of the Conservative party, the 150,000 or so people who pay membership fees to be part of the Conservative party.
[00:06:35] These people were predominantly older, white people living outside major cities, living in the countryside in the south of the country.
[00:06:45] To be precise, over half were aged over 60, 97% were white, and they were overwhelmingly based in Southern England.
[00:06:56] And it was this group of 150,000 that voted for the next leader of the party, and therefore the next Prime Minister.
[00:07:05] So on September 6th, after a tediously long campaign, Liz Truss was announced as the winner, beating Sunak with 57.4% of the vote to his 42.6%. Why am I going into such detail here?
[00:07:22] Well, the point to reiterate is that an absolutely tiny percentage of the country voted for Liz Truss. Less than a hundred thousand people out of a voting population of almost 50 million, it’s less than 0.2%.
[00:07:38] And her leadership campaign had deeply divided the already divided Conservative party.
[00:07:45] So, when she walked through the door of 10 Downing Street, the home of the British Prime Minister, on September 6th, she was doing so with minimal public support and as the leader of a divided party.
[00:07:59] It was always going to be an uphill battle.
[00:08:03] So, what actually happened?
[00:08:05] Well, this story only lasts 44 days, but they were certainly eventful.
[00:08:12] Liz Truss went to meet the Queen, as is customary for a new Prime Minister.
[00:08:17] Within 48 hours the queen was dead.
[00:08:21] Clearly, I’m not blaming Liz Truss, but it was an ominous start.
[00:08:26] And while Liz Truss can’t be faulted for the death of a 96-year-old woman, the rest of her demise was almost entirely self-inflicted, it was unnecessary and it was her fault.
[00:08:40] So, where to begin.
[00:08:42] Well, it all started to go wrong on September the 23rd, as she was only in her third week in the role.
[00:08:50] Her Chancellor of the Exchequer and close ally, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a “mini budget”.
[00:08:58] Traditionally in British politics, a Chancellor announces a new budget in the spring.
[00:09:05] But Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng decided to announce a new “mini budget” almost as soon as they were in power.
[00:09:13] It was, in theory, in reaction to the energy and cost-of-living crisis that was plaguing the UK, and was intended to provide a blueprint for their vision of the stagnant British economy.
[00:09:27] Kwasi Kwarteng stood up in Parliament and made his announcement.
[00:09:33] He announced a series of tax cuts, especially for the highest earners, those earning over £150,000 a year.
[00:09:41] These tax cuts would cost the country £45 billion.
[00:09:47] The idea behind it, which was a key part of his and Liz Truss’s philosophy about how to stimulate the British economy, was that by reducing taxes and government interference, the size of the state essentially, the country would become more attractive to business, and in turn the economy would grow.
[00:10:07] This wasn’t some great secret that he and Liz Truss had kept, and they “surprised” the country by announcing it.
[00:10:14] The pair of them had literally written a book on exactly this back in 2012 called “Britannia Unchained”, which set out their vision for a low-tax British economy.
[00:10:28] And Truss had talked extensively about this during her campaign to be party leader.
[00:10:34] Now was Truss and Kwarteng’s time to test out their plan, to finally unchain the UK from the shackles of high taxes and low productivity.
[00:10:46] Unfortunately, it did not go as planned.
[00:10:49] The financial markets did not react in the way that Kwarteng and Truss had hoped.
[00:10:55] The value of the British pound dropped immediately after the budget announcement, reaching an all-time record low against the US dollar.
[00:11:05] The cost of borrowing skyrocketed, people in the UK trying to get mortgages suddenly found that the interest rates had doubled or tripled and their dream house was now out of reach.
[00:11:19] The Bank of England was forced to intervene and buy £65 billion in government bonds.
[00:11:27] Now, this isn’t a show about business or finance, so we aren’t going to go into the exact details, but the point is that this announcement was very poorly received by the world of business and it ended up costing the country literally billions of pounds.
[00:11:44] And Liz Truss saw her popularity ratings go the way of the British pound, this already unpopular Prime Minister became public enemy number one.
[00:11:56] She was pressured to reverse the announcement, or at least asked to set out a plan for how these massive tax cuts were going to be paid for.
[00:12:05] Yet she did not, instead promising to continue with her plan, not apologising or accepting in the slightest that she bore some responsibility for the chaos.
[00:12:18] She did make one concession, which was to sack her close ally and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, which she did on the 14th of October, after it became clear that she needed to do something.
[00:12:31] He was replaced by a more moderate politician, a man called Jeremy Hunt, who quickly reversed some of the major tax cuts that Kwarteng and Truss had called for.
[00:12:43] By now, there were plenty of people calling for Liz Truss to go and newspaper articles with headlines like “What is the point of Liz Truss?”
[00:12:53] Her entire political philosophy was one of low taxes and shrinking the state, and if she had completely reversed, gone back on this policy, what was the point of her being Prime Minister in the first place?
[00:13:08] One British tabloid newspaper, called The Daily Star, even set up a live video feed with a picture of Liz Truss next to a real lettuce, asking its readers the question of who would last longer, the lettuce or the British Prime Minister.
[00:13:24] This was on October 14th.
[00:13:27] Unfortunately, the next week would get even worse for Liz Truss.
[00:13:32] She was doing absolutely terribly in opinion polls, with a dismal 9% of the country thinking that she was doing a good job, and predicting that if there was an election tomorrow, the Conservatives would lose the vast majority of their seats.
[00:13:49] It was crisis time.
[00:13:51] Although she was incredibly unpopular, the rules of the Conservative Party mean that nobody can challenge a leader for 12 months after a leadership contest.
[00:14:02] So what happened was a growing number of Conservative MPs started to voice their lack of confidence in her, both formally and informally, on and off the record.
[00:14:14] And at the same time the Labour party started putting pressure on the Conservative government to call a general election, an election that Labour was almost guaranteed to win if Truss was still leader of the Conservatives.
[00:14:29] If things had been bad for Truss after the crashing of the pound and the loss of her closest ally, things were about to get much worse.
[00:14:39] And there were two real nails in the coffin.
[00:14:43] Firstly, on October the 19th her Home Secretary was forced to resign after being found to have used a personal email for government business, and in her resignation letter - which was made public - she was highly critical of Liz Truss.
[00:15:01] Then later that day there was a chaotic vote on whether to ban fracking, the mining technique, with some Conservative MPs being accused of being bullied into voting with the government.
[00:15:15] For many Conservative MPs, enough was enough.
[00:15:20] Here’s a short clip of an interview with a senior MP called Charles Walker where he explains the mood.
[00:15:28] /
[00:15:28] Charles Walker: This whole affair is inexcusable. It, it is just, it is pitiful reflection on the conservative parliamentary party at every level. This is absolute disgrace.
[00:15:40] As a tory MP of 17 years who's never been a minister who's got on with it loyally most of the time. I think it's a shambles and a disgrace. I think it is utterly appalling.
[00:15:53] I'm, I'm livid, and I really shouldn't say this, but I hope all those people that put Liz Truss in number 10. I hope it was worth it. I hope it was worth it for the ministry or red box. I hope it was worth it to sit around the cabinet table because the damage they have done to our party is extraordinary.
[00:16:11] Alastair Budge: Enough was enough.
[00:16:14] The following day, just 44 days after she had taken the job, and with record-breaking levels of unpopularity and absolutely no way out, Liz Truss announced that she would resign as British Prime Minister.
[00:16:30] She was, indeed, beaten by the lettuce.
[00:16:34] There were calls for a general election by the Labour Party, with critics pointing out that the Conservatives needed to give the British people the chance to choose their next Prime Minister.
[00:16:45] The choice didn’t go to the British people, and the leadership contest was thankfully much shorter than the one in the summer.
[00:16:55] It took just four days, and Rishi Sunak received enough votes from MPs to be elected party leader, and therefore Prime Minister.
[00:17:05] To date, at least, Sunak’s tenure as Prime Minister has been refreshingly boring and uneventful compared to the chaos of his predecessor.
[00:17:15] He has unwound many of Truss’s pledges, although he is the leader of a deeply divided and still deeply unpopular party.
[00:17:24] And his challenge is two-fold.
[00:17:27] Firstly, and this is of course the primary challenge, to deal with the many crises plaguing the United Kingdom, from less avoidable crises such as the energy and cost-of-living crisis through to the completely self-inflicted crisis of reversing the economic damage of Liz Truss’s 44 days in charge.
[00:17:47] But secondly, his job is to rebuild some of the public trust in the Conservative party that was completely destroyed by Liz Truss.
[00:17:58] The Conservative party’s core message to the British public has been for a long time that it is fiscally responsible, that it is the party that knows how to manage public spending and the economy, yet Liz Truss’s 44 days in office have done what many commentators have said to be irreparable damage to this.
[00:18:20] Fortunately for the Conservatives, the resignation of Liz Truss gave them an immediate bump in the polls, with Rishi Sunak seen as a more moderate and more competent candidate than his predecessor.
[00:18:34] Sunak has until January of 2025 to call a general election, he has two years to rebuild trust and patch up the damage from the most chaotic period of recent British political history.
[00:18:48] It’s a monumental task that he has ahead of him, and all that remains to be said is let’s check in again in a couple of years and see whether he manages it.
[00:19:01] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Liz Truss, the 44-Day Prime Minister.
[00:19:07] I imagine that you might have been aware of some of the chaos that took place when she was Prime Minister, but I hope that this has shed some light on it, and provided a bit of explanation about what exactly went wrong.
[00:19:20] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:24] How was this news covered in your country?
[00:19:26] How has this changed your perception of British politicians, or of the UK as a country?
[00:19:32] Do you think that Rishi Sunak will manage to undo the damage caused by Liz Truss?
[00:19:37] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:41] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:49] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:19:53] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
