Once a student activist for a smaller, centrist party, the Liberal Democrats, Ms. Truss, 47, campaigned for Britain to remain in the European Union during the 2016 Brexit referendum. But the Foreign Secretary has remade herself as a champion of Brexit causes, pursuing aggressive negotiations with the European Union over trade in Northern Ireland.
The Conservative Party leadership campaign, which will result in the naming of a new Prime Minister, has unfolded amid rapidly deepening economic turmoil. Household energy bills are spiking, inflation has soared into double digits, and the Bank of England warns of a prolonged recession.
However. despite spending a month on the campaign trail, Ms. Truss has offered very few clues about how she would confront a mounting economic crisis in Britain that many experts view as the gravest in a generation.
Instead, she has vowed to cut taxes, discard remaining European Union regulations and shrink the size of Britain’s government — crowd-pleasing measures tailor-made for the members of the Conservative Party, who tend to be older, wealthier, and more right-wing than the party’s voters, to say nothing of the broader British electorate.
