LONDON: Former Prime Minister Liz Truss suffered a major defeat on Friday, losing her seat in South West Norfolk in what marks one of the Conservative Party’s most notable loss in the UK general elections.
Truss became the first former UK premier in over a century to lose her seat in a landslide defeat for her Conservatives to the Labour Party.
Her defeat came at the hands of Labour candidate Terry Jermy, who secured victory with a margin of 640 votes. Truss, known for her brief 45-day tenure as prime minister, has been cited by many Conservatives as a pivotal figure in the party’s historic decline.
In the 2019 election, Truss had comfortably secured a majority of 26,000 votes, and her defeat in this election was unexpected. Campaign reports indicated Truss’s absence from the constituency during the campaign period, despite her 14-year tenure as its MP.
With 638 out of 650 seats counted, the Conservative Party had secured only 119 seats, poised to perform worse than their previous nadir in 1997.
The loss of South West Norfolk, a seat Truss had held since 2010, symbolize the extend of the party’s electoral collapse.
Following her defeat, Truss did not deliver a concession speech but later spoke to the BBC saying “I think the issue we faced as Conservatives is we haven’t delivered sufficiently on the policies people want. And that means keeping taxes low, but also particularly on reducing immigration – and I think that’s been a crucial issue here in South West Norfolk.”
