Liz Truss has become the first former prime minister for almost 9o years to lose their seat at a general election, being forced into second place in the South West Norfolk seat that she held at the 2019 election by a margin of more than 26,000.
Truss, who held the seat from 2010, received 11,217 votes, losing to Labour’s Terry Jermy, who received 11,847, but beating Reform UK’s Tobias McKenzie, who got 9,958.
The contest in the constituency – the Conservatives’ 11th-safest seat in 2019 – had been complicated by the strong Reform showing and by a challenge by former
Conservative James Bagge, a local landowner who ran as an anti-Truss candidate and took
6,282 votes.
There was anecdotal evidence of a strong personal vote against Truss, who served as prime minister for a disastrous 49 days in 2022.
Truss did not speak on stage after the loss, which saw her vote share drop by an astonishing 43.4 percent as Labour’s Terry Jermy enjoyed a narrow victory of 630 votes. One of the architects of the now-infamous September 2022
‘mini-budget’ – which caused a significant drop in Tory support in the polls – saw her share haemorrhage to Reform UK, following a UK-wide trend.
The BBCās Ros Atkins managed to tie Britainās shortest-serving Prime Minister down for a brief interview after the shock result. But it didnāt quite go to plan, as a humiliated Truss turned her back on Atkins in the middle of the interview and began to walk away from the camera.
Truss said the scale of the Conservatives’ loss showed they “haven’t delivered sufficiently on the policies people want”, including “keeping taxes low but also particularly on reducing immigration”. She accepted an element of responsibility for the result, accepting she was
“part” of the Tories’ failure to deliver on those promises and that the party “did not do enough” during their 14 years in power.
Peoplesmind