Liz Truss has won the U.K. Conservatives' internal leadership ballot and will become Prime Minister tomorrow. Her win over rival Rishi Sunak, though, turned out to be much closer than the wipeout that early polls had expected—the closest Conservative leadership election this century, in fact. This might suggest that the abstract idea of a young right-wing leader is more appealing to party members than the concrete reality of Liz Truss in the news every day.
The government, of which she was a part and now leads, is unpopular, trailing the Labour party by 15 points in a new YouGov poll which also sees the Liberal Democrats at 11% and the Greens at 7%. But Truss still has the commanding parliamentary majority won by Boris Johnson in 2019, and three years to turn things around before she must call a general election.
