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Liz Truss was named Britain’s new conservative prime minister on Monday and will soon take over from her scandal-scarred predecessor, Boris Johnson.
The 47-year-old, currently foreign secretary, will be formally appointed by Queen Elizabeth II during a Tuesday ceremony at the monarch’s Balmoral estate in Scotland.
Truss, a mother of two and a staunch admirer of the UK’s Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher, will become Britain’s third female leader.
So who is Britain’s soon-to-be new prime minister?
Truss, who was born in Oxford and lived in Scotland in her early years, is the daughter of a left-wing math professor and a nurse.
Her parents would take her on anti-Thatcher protests when she was a child where she remembers screaming: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie — out, out, out!”
Truss revealed in a 2018 speech that she started developing her own conservative political views early on and would often argue “against my socialist parents in our left-wing household.”
Her family moved to Leeds in northern England, where she attended a public high school, and she then studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University.
She joined the Conservative Party after graduating, which she later recalled as being “distinctly unfashionable” at the time.
