5 of Liz Truss's biggest ever u-turns

What do you think of when you think of Liz Truss?

Cheese? Pork markets? General incompetency? Perhaps.

You might also think of a Go-kart screeching around in 100 different directions. Why? Because Truss's premiership has been so far defined by her almost uncountable number of u-turns on just about everything, especially her economic policy that a small number Tories elected her on.

This is nothing new though. Truss has a chequered history of changing her opinion on a number of huge issues, including the small issues of whether Britain should remain in the European Union and how to tax the nation.

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So here are Liz Truss's biggest u-turns of her political career.

Liberal Democrats

During her university days, Truss supported the Liberal Democrats. Indeed, her political debut was a speech at the 1994 conference backing a motion calling for the abolition of the monarchy. We'll get to that later.

She obviously then joined the Tories and has held numerous cabinet positions during her tenure as a Tory MP. And when she won the Tory leadership election and became the new PM, her old Lib Dem university club simply said "sorry".

We can't forgive them for helping her rise to power, though.

Brexit

As you would expect from a Lib Dem, Truss was also a Remainer in her past and kept that opinion through to the Brexit referendum itself.

Until... Remain lost and she changed her mind. Speaking during one of her leadership hustings she pledged to "unleash the full potential of Brexit" and by the of 2023, she has promised to scrap or replace EU laws deemed to hold back the economy.

Monarchy

As said previously, Truss's first speech in politics was about the abolition of the monarchy. The leader at the time Paddy Ashdown is said to have believed the party would be “finished” if the motion had passed.

Truss said her views changed and she was among one of the last people to speak with Queen Elizabeth II before she died. She's also had a few meetings with King Charles, where she has behaved in a spectacularly bizarre way.

Civil servant pay

During her leadership campaign, Truss unveiled a peculiar policy regarding pay.

She said she wanted to link civil servants' salaries to living standards where they work, meaning similar jobs could have different salaries depending on their location.

She claimed the scheme could be rolled out to other public sector areas, saving £8.8bn a year and said it would help the private sector compete with the public sector in various areas in England, before her campaign this afternoon announced that "there will be no proposal taken forward on regional pay boards for civil servants or public sector workers.”

After a huge amount of backlash, she junked the policy and said it had been "misrepresented".

Mini-budget

Then Truss became the prime minister and it only took her a few weeks to u-turn on basically every single economic policy she had put forward and the guiding economic principles of her ideology - nothing major then.

First she discussed cutting the 45p rate of tax, then changed her mind, and when that didn't placate the markets enough she ended up sacking chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, installing Jeremy Hunt to replace him and junking the majority of her other policies like changes to corporation tax and the length of time the government will support people with their energy bills.

Ouch.

Truss is the political equivalent of a flip-flop - just less useful.

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