Who is in charge of Britain?

Just 44 days into her premiership, Liz Truss is standing down.

At a podium outside 10 Downing Street, she admitted that she “cannot deliver the mandate” on which she was elected and has therefore spoken to King Charles to tender her resignation.

Truss said she will remain as PM until a successor has been chosen in a leadership election “to be completed within the next week”.

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Country left ‘leaderless’

Even before the announcement, MPs of all parties had been saying Truss was “prime minister in name only”, said David Maddox at the Daily Express.

Jeremy Hunt was brought in just a week ago as chancellor to help Truss shore up power. But as he “picked through the debris clearing up the mess of an orgy of tax cuts and spending promises” her authority “utterly evaporated”, Maddox said.

Hunt, seen as the “de facto PM”, was then overruled “by a coalition of Tory MPs and newspaper editors” on pensions policy yesterday, said Sam Coates at Sky News. After the “turmoil” of Wednesday, when Suella Braverman quit as home secretary and further in-party rows broke out over fracking, it was “very hard to say” who was in charge, said Coates.

This “chaotic 24 hours” has “rocked Britain’s political scene” and left the country “leaderless”, said CNBC.

Ending the paralysis

Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, is now drawing up plans for “a quickfire leadership election which will be concluded by the end of next week”, said The Telegraph.

The newspaper suggested that candidates might be shortlisted by Monday, whittled down in a series of ballots by Conservative MPs and then put to an online vote by party members on Friday unless a unity candidate emerges.

But MPs told the Telegraph there was “little sign” of such a candidate emerging as “there didn’t appear to be ‘a very high level of organisation’ among the camps of possible successors”.

After weeks of government “paralysis”, Truss’s resignation has left businesses uncertain of the plan for “policy issues such as the taxes they will pay and the extent of future energy subsidies”, said The Guardian.

Tony Danker, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, warned that the next PM “will need to act to restore confidence from day one”.

But in The Spectator, Isabel Hardman said Brady is “about to lead the party’s backbench trade union to its fifth prime minister and probably its most chaotic period yet, even worse than the chaos of the past few months”.