Truss is asked by the British monarch to form a new government a day after the Conservative Party picked her as a leader.


Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Liz Truss during an audience at Balmoral | [Jane Barlow/Pool Photo via AP]

Liz Truss became Britain's next prime minister after meeting with Queen Elizabeth II, who asked her to form a new government.

Truss, 47, took office on Tuesday in the carefully choreographed ceremony with the monarch a day after the ruling Conservative Party announced that Truss was elected as its leader.

"The Queen received in Audience The Right Honourable Elizabeth Truss MP today and requested her to form a new Administration," a Buckingham Palace statement said.

"Ms Truss accepted Her Majesty's offer and kissed hands upon her appointment as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury," it added.

Her predecessor, Boris Johnson, formally stepped down during his own audience with the queen at her Balmoral estate in Scotland.

In his last speech as the prime minister, Johnson said earlier on Tuesday that his policies had given the country the economic strength to help people weather the energy crisis before he signed off with his typical bluster.

"I am like one of those booster rockets that has fulfilled its function," Johnson said before getting into a car and leaving the gates of Downing Street for the last time as prime minister.

"I will now be gently re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down invisibly in some remote and obscure corner of the Pacific."

On Monday, the Conservative Party's 172,000 members elected Truss to lead their party.

On Tuesday afternoon, she is expected to make her first speech as leader of a nation of 67 million people anxious about soaring energy bills and a looming winter of recession and labour unrest.


Johnson, with his wife Carrie Johnson, arrives to deliver a speech outside Downing Street | [Henry Nicholls/Reuters]