Home Appointments Prime Minister
Prime Minister
UK Government
| Appointee | Liz Truss |
|---|---|
| Role | Prime Minister |
| Organisation | UK Government |
| Domain | Politics |
| Start | 6 September 2022 |
| End | 25 October 2022 |
| Notes | Third female UK PM after Thatcher and May; shortest-serving PM in history (45 days) |
Institutional context
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is the head of His Majesty's Government. Truss is the third woman to hold the office, after Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) and Theresa May (2016–2019). Her premiership is the shortest in the office's history.
Career path
Truss studied philosophy, politics and economics at Merton College, Oxford. She worked as an economist at Shell and Cable & Wireless and at the Reform think tank before entering Parliament in 2010 as Conservative member for South West Norfolk. She held successive cabinet posts including Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (2014–2016), Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary (2016–2017), Chief Secretary to the Treasury (2017–2019), Secretary of State for International Trade (2019–2021), and Foreign Secretary (2021–2022).
Appointment
After Boris Johnson's resignation, Truss won the Conservative Party leadership contest against Rishi Sunak in September 2022 by a margin of approximately 57 to 43 percent of the membership vote. She was appointed Prime Minister on 6 September 2022. Her government delivered a tax-cutting "mini-budget" on 23 September that triggered sharp falls in sterling and gilt-market disorder, requiring Bank of England intervention. She announced her resignation on 20 October and left office on 25 October 2022, succeeded by Sunak.
Tenure
Forty-five days, including a national mourning period following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The brevity of the tenure makes it a singular event in the post-1721 history of the office.
Cluster context
Truss is the second-most-recent first-or-second woman in the role of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, occurring inside the dataset's principal cluster window. Her tenure overlapped with the EU institutional cluster but did not produce policy outputs of comparable durability. As a data point her appointment counts inside the cluster; her removal underscores that the appointment rate and the political stability of those appointments are independent measures.
