Britain’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has won the Tory leadership race, the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee announced on Monday.
Truss, 46, received votes from 81,326 of the party members, whereas her rival contender Rishi Sunak received 60,399 votes, the committee chairman Sir Graham Brady announced.
Truss will replace Boris Johnson as the country’s new prime minister and she is to become the third female prime minister of the UK after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May.
Truss is expected to receive the duty of forming a new government from Queen Elizabeth II on Tuesday.
In her victory speech, Truss thanked her supporters as well as her rival Sunak, saying the campaign showed the “breadth and depth of talent in the Conservative Party.”
She then paid tribute to the outgoing premier, “my friend Boris Johnson,” who was pressured out of the leadership amid a series of scandals.
“Boris, you got Brexit done. You crushed (former Labour Party leader) Jeremy Corbyn, you rolled out the (COVID-19) vaccine. And you stood up to (Russian President) Vladimir Putin. You were admired from Kyiv to Carlisle,” she said.
