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Queen appoints Truss as prime minister
We’ve now got a picture of Liz Truss meeting the Queen. This is the audience where the Queen was formally appointing Truss prime minister.
A photograph is all we’re going to get. TV cameras are not allowed to record these meetings, and even when they retire prime ministers reveal almost nothing about their meetings with the monarch. The Queen, of course, has said even less over the past 70 years about her audiences with her prime ministers. Truss is her 15th.
Key events
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Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader and Liz Truss supporter, told the World at One that he was offered a cabinet job by Truss but decided not to accept it. Explaining why, he said he had to consider whether he could “add value”, alongside what other things he could be doing if he did not take the appointment. He would not say what he was offered, but it was reported that he was lined up to be leader of the Commons.
And here is the formal announcement about Liz Truss’s appointment as PM from Buckingham Palace.
According to the Commons library briefing, even though Buckingham Palace says Truss “kissed hands” upon her appointment as PM, she probably didn’t. Now it is just a metaphor. The briefing says:
When it is clear an individual can form a government, they are made Prime Minister, to quote Harold Wilson in 1964, “on the spot”. They also become First Lord of the Treasury from that moment, although the Oath of Office (as First Lord) is taken at a later meeting of the Privy Council (meetings can take place virtually). There are no seals of office as Prime Minister.
There is also no kissing of hands, although that phrase is used to describe the process. This used to occur but has fallen into abeyance (Tony Blair, however, recalls tripping on the carpet so he “practically fell upon the Queen’s hands, not so much brushing as enveloping them”). Instead, an incoming male premier will bow and shake hands with the Monarch, and a female premier will curtsy. In recent years this moment has been photographed for the media. There are no other formalities.
Micheál Martin, the taoiseach (Irish PM), has issued a statement congratulating Liz Truss on her appointment as PM and saying he hopes the UK and Ireland can reach “agreed outcomes” on the Northern Ireland protocol.
The Liz Truss team have changed her Twitter profile.
Queen appoints Truss as prime minister
We’ve now got a picture of Liz Truss meeting the Queen. This is the audience where the Queen was formally appointing Truss prime minister.
A photograph is all we’re going to get. TV cameras are not allowed to record these meetings, and even when they retire prime ministers reveal almost nothing about their meetings with the monarch. The Queen, of course, has said even less over the past 70 years about her audiences with her prime ministers. Truss is her 15th.
Guto Harri, who was director of communications at No 10 for Boris Johnson in his final months in office, has used a LinkedIn post to say the Tories have a “collective appetite for self-harm”, the Telegraph’s Camilla Turner reports.
Outgoing head of Downing St comms Guto Harri reflects on his time at Number 10 in a LinkedIn post -notes the Conservative party’s “brutal” appetite for self-harm pic.twitter.com/oz8bsgcD6W
— Camilla Turner (@camillahmturner) September 6, 2022
Steven Swinford from the Times has more on Liz Truss’s plan to freeze energy bills.
Exclusive:
Liz Truss expected to freeze household energy bills at around £2,500
It will be the £1,971 energy price cap + the £400 universal handout, with a little on top
Cost expected to be around £90bn – coming from general taxation, not energy billshttps://t.co/WTCouv9LmV
— Steven Swinford (@Steven_Swinford) September 6, 2022
The government will reach a legally binding contracts with energy companies to freeze wholesale prices
It will be predicated on what the Govt wants the retail price to be
Truss has to factor in the £400 already coming on energy bills – hence the £2,500 figure
— Steven Swinford (@Steven_Swinford) September 6, 2022
The full and final plans are not due to be announced until Thursday.
Truss arrives at Balmoral for audience with Queen
Liz Truss has arrived at Balmoral for her audience with the Queen where she will be formally made prime minister. She is with her husband, Hugh O’Leary.
Buckingham Palace has confirmed that Boris Johnson has resigned, ITV’s Chris Ship reports.
UPDATE: Here is the press statement.
Liz Truss has not arrived at Balmoral yet, and so technically we don’t have a PM.
According to the Commons library briefing, this means the Queen is in charge for the moment. It says:
The monarch meets the departing prime minister and their successor, often in quick succession. In the interim, all executive authority vests in the monarch (until 1963, a gap of a day or two wasn’t uncommon).
Johnson leaves Balmoral after resigning as PM
Boris Johnson has now left Balmoral. That means he has resigned, and is no longer PM. This is from LBC’s Alan Zycinski.
Johnson arrives at Balmoral to tender his resignation to Queen
Boris Johnson has arrived at Balmoral where he will be tendering his resignation to the Queen, Sky News reports. It will be a private meeting, and what gets said is likely to remain a secret.
If you are interested in a full account of the process when the Queen appoints a new prime minister, David Torrance has written up what happens in a good blog for the House of Commons library.
Torrance points out that “it has become customary for a former prime minister’s partner and children to be invited to meet the Monarch following their resignation”. Johnson is accompanied by his wife, Carrie, but they seem to have left their two children at home.
Dorries praises Johnson in resignation letter for treating her as equal while other Tories patronised her
Aubrey Allegretti
Nadine Dorries has confirmed that she is resigning as culture secretary. In a resignation letter addressed to Boris Johnson, she says Liz Truss offered to let her stay in post, but that she decided to quit anyway. She says she told Truss she would be “better placed to support her from outside of the cabinet”.
That cryptic phrasing – which does not say that she will stay on the backbenches – may be taken by some as a hint that she hopes to be elevated to the Lords. Dorries has been one of Johnson’s most loyal supporters and his been tipped for inclusion in his resignation honours list.
I have submitted my letter of resignation to the outgoing Prime Minister.
I am humbled that Liz Truss extended her confidence in me by asking me to remain as Secretary of State for DCMS. I will always show her the same loyalty and support I have to @BorisJohnson.
Onwards! pic.twitter.com/CzNl3q2kJI
— Nadine Dorries (@NadineDorries) September 6, 2022
Dorries says she is delighted Truss had won the contest, and she tells Johnson Truss will be “a worthy successor, protecting your legacy and providing both leadership and vision for the nation”.
In her letter Dorries partly explains why she likes the outgoing PM so much. She implies that when she arrived in the Commons as an MP, some Tories (and MPs from other parties) patronised her because of her working class background and Liverpudlian accent, despite the fact that she had worked for the NHS and sold her own business. But Johnson treated her as an equal, she says.
During the leadership contest, Dorries was one of the most vociferous critics of Truss’ rival, Rishi Sunak, and claimed that Johnson had been deposed in a coup.
Her interventions have riled some colleagues, who believe her “Rottweiler” behaviour during the election has created long-lasting divisions in the party.
Jason Rodrigues
Liz Truss will be the 15th prime minister to serve the Queen, but almost certainly the first to be appointed by Her Majesty despite being on record as once saying the monarchy should be abolished. Truss’s views seem to have changed greatly from her Oxford University Lib Dems days when, at a party conference in Brighton in 1994, she contributed to a debate on the abolition of the monarchy, saying “we do not believe people should be born to rule”.
But her passionate speech was in vain as the conference voted against the motion supporting abolition.
Archie Kirkwood MP, the party’s chief whip, also pleaded for the Liberal Democrat youth section supporters to become “a bit more politically streetwise . . . Sometimes it is necessary to make sweeping gestures in politics, but not here, and not now. The stakes are too high.”
Here is how the Guardian reported Truss’s speech at the time.
Truss energy package will be ‘major moment’ that will end ‘uncertainty’ about bills, ally says
Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury and one of Liz Truss’s key allies, has been giving interviews this morning. He is expected to be made levelling up secretary in the reshuffle later today.
Here are the main points from what he has been saying.
It will come very shortly and there is a clear commitment to rise to the level of events and to provide early certainty to families and businesses that there will be help available to meet the undoubted challenges that this autumn and winter are going to bring.
So it will be a major moment, I think, in terms of drawing a line under the sense of uncertainty which undoubtedly is present in the country at this time.
However, as my colleagues Jessica Elgot and Lisa O’Carroll reported last night, Sunak himself is not expected to be offered a job.
My colleague Graeme Wearden has been covering what we know about Liz Truss’s proposed energy bills package, and reaction to it, on his business live blog. He says the pound went up this morning on the back of the latest reporting.
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