Mission impossible?

Liz Truss has risen spectacularly to become Britain's new prime minister, but enormous problems lie ahead- not least the cost of living crisis and divisions in her own party

- Toby Helm and Michael Savage

When it all began, more than seven weeks ago, with Liz Truss declaring at her cam-paign launch that she would “be ready to be prime minister from day one” , it didn’t look remotely likely that such an arrival in No 10 would ever come to pass.

The “Liz for leader” launch was amateurish and chaotic . The foreign secretary stumbled over her words, at one point mentioning “Putin’s appalling war in Ru … Ukraine”. Afterwards, she couldn’t find her way out of the room, and headed for a window.

While the contest was focused in Westminster it all seemed an unequal struggle. Rishi Sunak topped the ballot of Tory MPs at every stage. Truss was criticised for lacking polish and appeal, and for sounding wooden. Backing Remain in 2016 and being a member of the Lib Dems in her student days were not attributes on her CV that were going to help. Nor were parliamentary colleagues flocking to her.

But, playing the role of the continuity candidate who had remained loyal to Boris Johnson, Truss made the final two with Sunak. Six weeks of hustings across the UK followed, with the 150,000 or so Tory members making the final choice. On Monday she capped an extraordinary comeback, and a striking campaigning success among the Tory membership, when she was announced as the winner and next leader of the party and Britain’s new prime minister.

The foreign secretary, who won 81,326 votes (57.4%) of Tory members to the former chancellor’s 60,399 (42.6%), takes over from Johnson, who was ousted by his own MPs earlier this summer. But the euphoria of victory will quickly give way to the hard reality of the economic challenges ahead, with the country gripped by a cost of living crisis leaving families struggling to pay their energy bills this winter.