Former finance minister (Chancellor of the Exchequer) Rishi Sunak will meet with His Majesty King Charles III this morning and, after a ceremony of kissing hands, will become the United Kingdom’s next Prime Minister.
The handover of power between Britain’s outgoing and incoming Prime Ministers will take place today.
The United Kingdom is experiencing something of a period of political upheaval at the moment, and the passing of these two leaders contains a series of firsts and records. Leaving office, Liz Truss is the shortest-lasting Prime Minister ever, barring some caretaker leaders in history, and is Britain’s third-ever female leader: all of them, coincidentally, from the Conservative Party.
Rishi Sunak, on the other hand, is the third Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in two months — a record fast turnover in modern times — the youngest Prime Minister in over two centuries, the first non-European heritage Prime Minister, and as a Hindu the first leader to openly practice a faith other than Christianity since Benjamin Disraeli in 1874.
This morning, Liz Truss is leading her final government cabinet meeting and will make a farewell address to the nation from outside the official office and residence of the Prime Minister, 10 Downing Street, at a little after ten o’clock. Truss and Sunak will then both travel to meet with King in separate cars. Truss will enter first for a private audience with the King to offer her resignation, and after that is concluded she will leave and Sunak will be invited to meet the King.
The King will ask Sunak whether he commands Parliament and can form a government. As the leader of the largest political party in the United Kingdom Sunak will be able to reply that he can. King Charles III will then appoint Rishi Sunak to be his Prime Minister — top advisor, in other words — and Sunak will then run a government on the King’s behalf.
Having met with the King, Sunak will travel to Downing Street and is expected to make a speech to the nation a little after 11:30am. If it is anything like the robotic delivery of his victory speech to Conservative colleagues yesterday, expect it to be short and light on detail.
Sunak will then begin creating his new government. It is possible that given the coup / counter-revolutionary actions taken by Jeremy Hunt to replace key cabinet members during the dying days of the Truss government, there may be few key announcements to make. Hunt himself has already been installed as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Grant Shapps was installed as Home Secretary, both globalist centrists replacing recognisably small-c conservatives appointed by Truss for her short-lived government.
Perhaps the biggest question is who will be truly in charge. Jeremy Hunt’s imposition on Truss’s government earned him the title of ‘de facto Prime Minister’, as it was clear from the moment he entered government it was he who was truly in charge. Whether Hunt intends to continue running things with the managerial but blank Sunak as a titular leader, or whether Hunt was merely the assassin clearing the way for Sunak, is yet to be been.
It is indicative of the considerable change experienced by the United Kingdom in so short a space of time that on September 6th Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II met with Boris Johnson to receive his resignation and then appointed Liz Truss Prime Minister and then just 50 days later King Charles III is performing the same duty again.
Queen Elizabeth II died two days after appointing Truss in what is thought to have been her final public duty. Charles became King immediately, but his coronation is not due to take place until next Spring. Whether there will be another new Prime Minister by then is, at this stage, anyone’s guess.
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