- UK Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned Thursday after a catastrophic 44 days in office.
- Her plan to radically reshape the UK economy was brutally rejected by financial markets.
Liz Truss, the UK prime minister, resigned on Thursday after just 44 days in office.
Her departure came after her authority over her own party melted away, decimated after an attempt to defy economic gravity fell apart, leaving her to face the wrath of her furious MPs.
Truss inherited her position from her party fellow Boris Johnson, who himself resigned after a series of scandals around his personal integrity, particularly repeated breaches of the pandemic-era restrictions he himself implemented.
The MPs who supported Truss hoped that new leadership would be a clean break, allowing the Conservative Party to continue its unbroken 12 years in power in Britain.
Instead, her government began to waver almost immediately.
Truss began her administration pledging to radically overhaul the British economy, slashing taxes at the same time as pledging to spend billions of pounds subsidizing energy costs in the UK.
The plan, radically out of step with the background of soaring inflation and interest-rate hikes, spooked the financial markets.
The price of government bonds skyrocketed, a sign that investors were losing confidence in the UK's ability to manage its finances.
The value of the pound fell in tandem, touching a 37-year-low against the dollar.
Initial attempts by Truss and her finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng to ride out the chaos did not last long.
First, Truss ditched her headline pledge to cut taxes for high-earnings.
Then, when this failed to stabilize the situation, she fired Kwarteng himself, and this week allowed his successor Jeremy Hunt to publicly dismantle almost all of her remaining plans.
Having been forced into a humiliating reversal, Truss was faced with her rebellious MPs, many of whom had supported her rivals in the leadership election that she narrowly won over the summer.
Some began to publicly call for her resignation as Truss's personal stock tanked, with a YouGov poll placing her in the worst position of any prime minister in history, with a favorability rating of -70.
The situation escalated on Wednesday when Suella Braverman, a top member of Truss's cabinet who ran against her over the summer, quit with a scathing letter suggesting that Truss had forced her out over a breach of email policy.
With barely disguised venom, Braverman wrote "I have made a mistake, I accept responsibility; I resign," drawing a implicit but stark contrast between her resignation and Truss remaining in office.
The situation reached a breaking point Wednesday night, when Truss' government won a minor victory in parliament, but at the cost of enraging members of her party who accused her officials of bullying them into voting against their will.
Their fury was encapsulated by the calm-yet-scathing assault on the integrity of her government by the backbench MP Charles Walker, which immediately went viral.
—Dan Johnson (@DanJohnsonNews) October 19, 2022
As Thursday dawned, some of her party's MPs publicly called for her to go.
Others visited her in private.
In both cases, the message was clear: Truss would have to resign.
Just after lunchtime, less than two months after taking office, Truss announced her resignation, laid low by economic reality and the 357 MPs she commanded in name but never in reality.