The UK has finally replaced Boris Johnson with a new prime minister, who will be sworn in tomorrow.
Liz Truss won the race to replace Johnson with 57% of the vote against her opponent.
Via Breitbart:
Liz Truss is the new leader of Britain’s ruling political party, the Conservatives, and will become Prime Minister tomorrow.
The marathon-length process to replace Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and, by extension, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is almost at an end, with Liz Truss duly elected to replace him on Monday afternoon. Speaking to colleagues at a specially convened meeting at Queen Elizabeth II Hall in Westminster, the party officer responsible for Conservative leadership challenges and elections Sir Graham Brady revealed that Liz Truss had bested rival Rishi Sunak in the race to replace Boris Johnson.
Mary Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Truss, who is 47 years old, is now the leader of Britain’s largest political party, which means, because the United Kingdom has a Parliamentary rather than Presidential system, that she will now also become Prime Minister. The normally quick constitutional element of that process, which involves the outgoing leader meeting with the Queen to resign and the newcomer then taking on the role, is being delayed until Tuesday.
The Queen, 96, would normally travel to London to undertake her part in this important constitutional process, however her health means she will stay at her home in Scotland: both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss will travel for the meeting tomorrow, after which Truss will begin to assemble her government and lay out governing priorities. While many promises have been made and ideas mooted during the campaign, what she makes time to reiterate in the coming hours and days may be indicative of the future direction of travel, even if Conservative leaders traditionally have an extremely poor track record of keeping promises.
I don’t pay close attention to UK politics so I really don’t know anything about Liz Truss.
But the man who does, Nigel Farage, isn’t really a fan because he points out she was once a liberal Democrat activist and she opposed Brexit:
Speaking during his weekday GB News talk show, Farage reflected on the qualities of the two most likely finalist candidates, calling Sunak a “great globalist” and recalling Truss’s chequered past of membership of left-wing parties and opposing Brexit, even if she now sells herself as a pro-Brexit leader.
Farage said:
…it’s probably going to be Truss versus Sunak. It’s probably going to be the great globalist, the man who has family links and interests with businesses in China, who is happy working hand-in-glove with the big banks, who has helped raised our taxes to the highest in 70 years, against somebody who… as an adult, she was a Liberal Democrat activist. She spoke at the Liberal Democrat conference.
She wanted then, at least, to abolish the monarchy. She voted to remain. She voted three times for Mrs May’s dreadful deal. And yet suddenly the ERG, and prominent Eurosceptics, think she’s the one.
Reflecting that the most likely to win the competition, in the end, was Truss — despite candidates more popular with the Conservative party membership having already been eliminated from the competition by Conservative MPs — Farage mourned a “dreadful mistake”.
He continued, referring to the challenge the Conservatives will have at the next election holding onto the northern and midlands ‘red wall’ seats it won for the first time in the last election: “I think the Conservative Party are making a dreadful mistake. I think it’s Theresa May two-point-zero… ‘Yes, she was a Remainer, but It’ll be OK’: No, it won’t be OK and I don’t think she can connect with the red wall.”
I guess we’ll find out if Truss has really changed from her former liberal Democrat ways. My guess is that Farage is right, that she’s probably a wolf in sheep’s clothing and will become more visibly liberal in the days ahead, just like Boris did.