The rise and fall of Liz Truss: From pork markets to No10 and wilting lettuce
Former prime minister Liz Truss can now add former MP to her political CV.
Her tumultuous political career - at least for now - is over after she lost her South West Norfolk seat by just 630 votes.
The Remain supporter turned Brexit-backing, Tory right-wing advocate held the seat since 2010, but lost out to Labour following last night's vote.
It provided perhaps the defining moment of election night and symbolised the Tories' downfall.
It is a staggering turnaround in fortunes for someone - who less than two years ago - had just won the country's highest political office.
Ms Truss is best known for her short-lived tenure in No 10 when she devised the mini-budget alongside the chancellor at the time Kwasi Kwarteng.
On 5 September 2022, Ms Truss was announced as the victor in the Tory leadership contest and took the job of leading the country. She promised a "bold plan" to cut taxes and grow the economy and "deliver on the energy crisis".
But this soon fell flat - along with the pound, which hit a fresh 37-year low - after Mr Kwarteng announced the biggest raft of tax cuts for half a century.
Using more than £70bn of increased borrowing, he set out a package which included abolishing the top rate of income tax for the highest earners and axing the cap on bankers' bonuses while adding restrictions to the welfare system.
This soon led to Ms Truss telling the King she was resigning on 20 October.
It was not a straight road to being the UK's third woman prime minister.
Despite being billed by allies as the heir to the Iron Lady's throne, Ms Truss marched in her youth side-by-side with left-wingers to demand the ousting of Margaret Thatcher and supported remaining in the European Union in the 2016 referendum.
The Conservatives were not even her first political party, having initially had a brush with the Liberal Democrats and using a speech at their 1994 conference to back a motion calling for the abolition of the monarchy.
Born in Oxford in 1975 to parents she has described as "left-wing", her mother, a nurse and a teacher, took a young Ms Truss to marches for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s and to "peace camp".
Aged four, she moved to Paisley in Scotland, where she has recalled yelling a slogan that perhaps no other Tory Cabinet minister has ever yelled before.
"It was in Scottish so it was 'Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, oot, oot, oot'," shehas told the BBC."
It was to prove somewhat ironic for someone who went on to pay homage to some of Mrs Thatcher's more iconic photo opportunities.
But Ms Truss also had an early "fascination" with Mrs Thatcher, saying that she was around eight when she agreed to play her during a mock school election.
"I got no votes," she conceded.
Ms Truss says her father, a mathematics professor, has long struggled to comprehend her move to conservatism, believing, perhaps wishfully, she is a "sleeper working from inside to overthrow the regime".
The family later moved Leeds, where Ms Truss attended the Roundhay state secondary school before studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University.
It was there that she became active in student politics, with the Liberal Democrats, and espoused the anti-monarchist sentiment.At the 1997 Conservative Party conference, she met future husband Hugh O'Leary.She has two teenage daughters.
Ms Truss worked as an accountant for Shell and Cable & Wireless but her heart was in politics, though she suffered the setbacks of two failed electoral bids.
After the unsuccessful runs for the Tories in Hemsworth in 2001 and Calder Valley in 2005, she was elected as a councillor in Greenwich in 2006 before becoming deputy director of the right-of-centre Reform think tank two years later.
But she was selected as the candidate for the Tory safe seat of South West Norfolk after making it on to David Cameron's A-list of priority candidates.
She entered Parliament after winning in the 2010 general election by a comfortable majority of more than 13,000 votes.
Her candidacy narrowly survived an attempt by traditionalist members of her local Tory association - nicknamed the "Turnip Taliban" over their conservative views and their local agricultural product - to deselect her after it emerged she had an affair with married Conservative MP Mark Field.
During her early days in Parliament, she co-authored the Britannia Unchained book alongside Thatcherite future Cabinet colleagues Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab.
It set out proposals to strip back regulation and encourage innovation, but caused controversy with a claim that British workers are "among the worst idlers in the world".
Two years after entering Parliament, Ms Truss was part of the government, being made an education minister in the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition.
After clashes with Lib Dem deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg, she was promoted to environment secretary in 2014.
But while her fortunes were rising in Westminster, her reputation as a speechmaker faltered.
It was in the environment brief that she gave an often-ridiculed address to the Tory conference where she discussed her left-to-right conversion in a pantomime manner.
Her tone switched to a serious one when decrying the state of play that saw the UK importing two thirds of its cheese. "That is a disgrace," she insisted, deadpan.
Another political conversion was under way, and she shifted from arguing to stay in the EU at the 2016 referendum to become a strong defender of the decision to leave.
She was rewarded with the role of foreign secretary, becoming only the UK's second woman to hold the title, in September 2021 after Mr Raab was moved aside in the wake of his handling of the Afghanistan crisis.
In the Foreign Office she took a tough stance in talks and would anger the EU with legislation threatening to break international law over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
She would also oversee the successful release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe andAnoosheh Ashoori from Iranian detention where other ministers had failed.
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