The foreign secretary beat rival and former chancellor Rishi Sunak in a vote of Conservative party members by 81,326 votes to 60,399 – by a margin of 57-43 – after a seven-week contest to succeed Boris Johnson. Truss will meet the Queen on Tuesday at Balmoral, the monarch’s estate, and then immediately return to London to announce her cabinet and address the country’s economic crisis. She will become Britain’s 56th prime minister and the fourth Tory holder of Number 10 in just over six years. She will also become the country’s third female prime minister after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May. Truss is seeking to cap energy prices – average household bills will rise from almost £2,000 to more than £3,500 in October – in a costly market intervention to prevent households from becoming miserable and businesses from collapsing. Kwasi Kwarteng, who is tipped to become Truss chancellor, wrote in the Financial Times on Sunday that “decisive action is needed to get families and businesses through this winter and next.” Truss’s team said the total package would not exceed £100 billion but could be closer, given the scale of support needed for households and to protect small firms. With 27.4 million households, freezing gas and electricity bills at the current typical annual cost of £1,971 would cost around £40 billion a year, but that bill would rise sharply if wholesale gas prices remain at current levels high levels. They currently stand at £5 a thermometer, 66 per cent higher than the benchmark price of £3 a thermometer which underpins the proposed retail energy price cap of £3,549 from next month. Kwarteng examines whether massive government intervention in the energy market should be offset by general taxation or through a future levy on consumers’ bills — the latter could be politically problematic. Truss also wants to reform energy markets to lower bills. It seeks to persuade nuclear and renewable energy producers to voluntarily sign new 15-year contracts at fixed prices well below the current prices that give them profits tied to wildly inflated natural gas prices. Truss paid tribute to outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson, saying he was “admired from Kyiv to Carlisle”. “I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy, tackling people’s energy bills and also the long-term problems we have with energy supply,” he added. Mr Truss has promised to deliver a “major” electoral victory for the Conservatives in a vote he said will be held in 2024, but the poll on Monday demonstrated the scale of the challenge. A recent YouGov poll showed that only 14 percent of Britons thought Truss would make a better prime minister than Johnson. A Survation poll gave the opposition Labor party a 46-29 lead over the Tories. The 47-year-old incoming prime minister, who has served in cabinet for eight years, has promised a right-wing agenda of tax cuts — largely financed by borrowing — in a bid to halt Britain’s slide into a long recession. Truss won the party crown after a long and arduous battle to succeed Johnson, who resigned on July 7 after a cabinet mutiny under Sunak over his conduct as prime minister.

Truss presented herself as Margaret Thatcher’s heir, promising tax cuts and less regulation and insisting that it was wrong to see all economic policy through “the lens of redistribution”. On foreign policy, he took a tough line on Russia and vowed to stand up to Brussels in a row over post-Brexit trade arrangements in Northern Ireland. Truss will announce her new cabinet on Tuesday. Kwarteng will be her chancellor, while Foreign Secretary James Cleverley is expected to be promoted to secretary of state. Attorney General Shwela Braverman is expected to replace Priti Patel, who resigned as Home Secretary on Monday. In other key appointments, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a right-wing Johnson ally, is expected to become business secretary with responsibility for energy policy. Ben Wallace will remain in defense while Truss ally Thérèse Coffey has been tipped to become health secretary.