Revenge against the Tories: Liz Truss’ defeat symbolizes massive UK anti-Conservative backlash

It will go down as the moment that capped the worst of all election nights for one of the world’s oldest — and most successful — political parties. 

As Britain’s Conservatives woke up to the full scale of their humiliating defeat in the U.K. general election on Friday morning, news emerged from a rural district in eastern England that former Prime Minister Liz Truss had lost her seat in parliament. 

In many ways, Truss’ ignominious exit is the perfect symbol of this election.

She served as premier for just 45 disastrous days in 2022 — the shortest tenure ever — before she was forced to resign after triggering a market meltdown with her package of unfunded tax cuts. The economic consequences are still being felt today.

Since leaving office, Truss has doubled down on her hard-right “Reaganomics” agenda, written a book blaming the deep state for her downfall and even endorsed Donald Trump to be the next U.S. president. Back home, her party lost the right to be taken seriously as voters looked elsewhere. Now it has lost power, too. 

Truss’ failure was also part of a wider pattern on election night that saw a procession of senior party figures ejected from parliament. Her constituency was one of several previously “safe” Tory seats once held by Conservative prime ministers that fell to opposition parties. Boris Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge in West London was won by the center-left Labour Party. Theresa May’s seat of Maidenhead in Berkshire, west of the capital, fell to the centrist Liberal Democrats — as did Witney, the wealthy Oxfordshire district once held by David Cameron. 

Even the late Margaret Thatcher’s north London constituency of Finchley voted the Tories out and chose a Labour MP for the first time since the Tony Blair era. 

It was a bleak night for many Conservatives, including a record number of senior ministers serving in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet. 

Political soap opera

The first big name to go was Grant Shapps, the defense secretary, who had served at the highest level in multiple government roles stretching back more than a decade. 

He blamed his own party’s recent record of infighting for putting voters off. The public, he said, were sick of the “endless political soap opera” and the “internal rivalries and divisions” that warring Conservatives have played out in public. “It’s not so much that Labour won this election, but rather that the Conservatives have lost it,” said Shapps.

Penny Mordaunt, who had been tipped as a potential future leader, also lost her seat in the Southern English coastal town of Portsmouth. Her party, Mordaunt said, had “taken a battering.”

Lord President of the Council, Penny Mordaunt, carries the Sword of State ahead of the coronations of Britain’s King Charles III. | Pool photo by Victoria Jones/AFP via Getty Images

Mordaunt, who earned international fame carrying the sword of state during King Charles’ coronation last year, warned Tories not to learn the wrong lessons from their crushing defeat. Conservatives should not indulge in “talking to an ever smaller slice of ourselves” but instead reconnect with voters “if we want again to be the natural party of government.”

Five Tory prime ministers in eight years

The Conservatives had been in power continuously since 2010 and they changed leader repeatedly, during a period of unprecedented turmoil for the country. 

After a relatively stable five years in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Cameron’s Tories won a surprise majority in 2015 and had no choice but to deliver their election pledge on holding an “in-out” referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. That unleashed a political civil war that changed U.K. and European politics permanently. 

In the eight years since the Brexit vote, there have been five Tory prime ministers, along with scores of ministers first joining, then being fired or resigning from government as the party lurched from scandal to crisis and back again. 

The senior Conservatives who lost their seats include: the current Justice Secretary Alex Chalk; Chief Whip Simon Hart; Education Secretary Gillian Keegan; former Trade Secretary Liam Fox; ex-Health Secretary Thérèse Coffey; former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg. 

In 1997, Tony Blair swept to power as Labour leader with a landslide that Keir Starmer looks set to match. British voters weary of 18 years of Conservative rule back then still recall the cathartic moment when Cabinet minister Michael Portillo lost his seat. 

For millions now struggling with higher home loan repayments after Truss’ disastrous mini-budget, a new chapter has been written in Britain’s savage story of electoral revenge.