Liz Truss has resigned as prime minister after just six weeks

Liz Truss has resigned as prime minister just six weeks after her Tory leadership victory.

This makes her the shortest serving prime minister in British history.

In a statement outside of Number 10 this afternoon, Truss said she ‘cannot deliver the mandate’ on which she was elected.

She said: “I came into office at a time of great economic and international instability. Families and businesses were worried about how to pay their bills.”

Adding that she was elected ‘with a mandate to change this’, she continued: “We delivered on energy bills, and on cutting national insurance.”

Truss then went on to say she now recognises she ‘cannot deliver the mandate’ on which she was elected, ‘given the situation’. 

She revealed that she has already spoken to His Majesty the King to tender her resignation.

A leadership election ‘is to be completed within the next week’ to ensure ‘we remain on a path to deliver our fiscal plans’. 

Truss will remain as prime minister until a successor has been chosen.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has called for a general election in the wake of Truss’s resignation, with him saying the Conservative Party has ‘shown it no longer has a mandate to govern’.

Starmer said in a statement: “After twelve years of Tory failure, the British people deserve so much better than this revolving door of chaos. In the last few years, the Tories have set record-high taxation, trashed our institutions and created a cost-of-living crisis.

“Now, they have crashed the economy so badly that people are facing £500 a month extra on their mortgages. The damage they have done will take years to fix.”

He continued: “The Tories cannot respond to their latest shambles by yet again simply clicking their fingers and shuffling the people at the top without the consent of the British people.

They do not have a mandate to put the country through yet another experiment; Britain is not their personal fiefdom to run how they wish. The British public deserve a proper say on the country’s future.

“They must have the chance to compare the Tories’ chaos with Labour’s plans to sort out their mess, grow the economy for working people and rebuild the country for a fairer, greener future.

“We must have a chance at a fresh start. We need a general election – now.”