London
CNN
—
Liz Truss Britain’s prime minister was angered by a silent vote after more MPs called for him to resign, fighting to save his job. resignation of the home secretary late on Wednesday.
The Truss government has “12 hours” to “turn the ship around” after Thursday’s vote on whether to ban controversial fracking for shale gas turned into chaos, Conservative MP Simon Hoare said.
Lawmakers said Truss was lobbying MPs to vote against the ban. The government initially presented the vote as a vote of confidence in the Truss government, but there remains confusion over whether that was the case. A Downing Street spokesman said on Thursday that Conservative MPs who did not take part in Tuesday’s vote would face disciplinary action, PA Media reported.
The chaos comes hours after Truss’ home secretary, Suella Braverman, resigned in dramatic fashion just seven weeks into the job in a scathing attack on the prime minister’s leadership.
“The work of government is based on people taking responsibility for their mistakes. It is not serious politics to pretend that we have done nothing wrong, to carry on as if no one sees what we are doing, and to hope that things will magically work out,” Braverman writes, criticizing Truss’ tax rollback. and government spending.
“I have concerns about the direction of this government,” Braverman said. “Not only have we broken key promises to our constituents, I have serious concerns about this Government’s commitment to delivering on its manifesto commitments.”
Truss, who sacked the finance minister last week after her disastrous and scrapped budget plan sent markets into turmoil, must now focus on heading into the weekend without her own MPs moving to remove her.
Backbencher Crispin Blunt told BBC Radio 4 on Thursday that Truss’s position was “completely untenable”, adding that he had shown a “lack of self-awareness” in the process.
“I’d be shocked if he didn’t get it,” Blunt said. “But one of the qualities that he has shown is that he has not known himself in this whole process because it should have been clear that he was not capable of leading our party and I don’t think he should have shown himself. First of all, he is ambitious for leadership.”
At least two Conservative MPs have confirmed they have tabled a no-confidence motion, although many more are believed to have done so privately. “I had high hopes for Liz Truss but after what happened last night her position is untenable and I have submitted a letter to Sir Graham Brady,” Sheryll Murray wrote on Twitter on Thursday, announcing the letter from her colleague William Wragg.
Truss will face a confidence vote if the influential Backbenchers Committee of 1922 changes its rules to change it immediately after a leadership vote, but previous prime ministers have been pressured to resign before facing the humiliation of a successful vote to oust them.
Earlier this year, Truss’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, narrowly survived a vote of confidence in his leadership. But he resigned a few weeks later when dozens of ministers and cabinet members resigned, citing a lack of confidence in his government.
Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labor Party, who is enjoying a huge lead in opinion polls, repeated his calls for an early general election on Thursday. “Britain cannot afford Tory chaos,” he tweeted. “My Labor government will provide the stability and leadership we need. For our economy. For growth. For working people. General election, now.”
A vote does not need to be held until January 2025 at the latest, but Britain’s third prime minister since the last poll in 2019 will put pressure on Truss’s successor to seek a new mandate from the public.
