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Liz Truss, who was UK prime minister for just 49 days, has appointed three political allies to the House of Lords as she exercised a longstanding convention for former premiers to confer peerages and honours despite the short and controversial nature of her period in office.
The former Tory leader nominated two prominent Brexiters and her former deputy chief of staff for elevation to parliament’s upper chamber, in a resignation peerages list published more than a year after her brief tenure in Downing Street in 2022.
Outgoing prime ministers routinely reward close colleagues, supporters and even opposition figures with peerages, knighthoods and other honours. But critics suggested it was inappropriate for Truss to do so given the circumstances of her chaotic term, in which she was forced to resign after a fateful Budget that included £45bn in unfunded tax cuts and plunged markets into turmoil.
Her approved nominations as peers include Matthew Elliott, the political strategist who was chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum that led to the UK’s exit from the bloc. He is currently president of the Jobs Foundation, a charity that champions the positive role of business in society.
Jon Moynihan, a venture capitalist who chaired the Vote Leave finance committee will also be ennobled. He gifted £20,000 to Truss’s party leadership campaign in the summer of 2022 and a further £33,265 to Truss that September after she became prime minister.
Truss backed Remain during the EU referendum campaign in 2016, but later became a committed supporter of Brexit.
The ex-prime minister’s third approved candidate for a peerage is her former senior adviser Ruth Porter, now a managing director at strategic communications firm FGS Global.
Downing Street published Truss’s resignation peerages and honours list on Friday night, alongside the annual New Year honours list. Truss said she was delighted that “champions for the conservative causes of freedom, limited government and a proud and sovereign Britain” had been “suitably honoured”.
She also nominated eight other individuals for honours, including four MPs, two former advisers, the chair of her constituency Tory association and the founder of a maths charity. Kwasi Kwarteng, who Truss sacked as her chancellor in the wake of the disastrous “mini Budget” of October 2022, was not among recipients.
The gongs for her political allies include a knighthood for Alec Shelbrooke, a former defence procurement minister who served for 49 days, his only stint in government since arriving in parliament in 2010.
Opposition party critics seized on the list, with Labour shadow Cabinet Office minister Jonathan Ashworth branding it a “slap in the face to working people who are paying the price of the Tories crashing the economy”.
Ashworth accused Rishi Sunak, Truss’s successor, of having “nodded through these tarnished gongs because he is too weak” to show leadership.
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper also criticised the “shameless move to reward Liz Truss’s car crash cronies”, claiming it “calls this whole honours system into disrepute”.
A government insider defended the move, pointing out that every past Labour prime minister had issued a dissolution or resignation list.
“The convention is the incumbent prime minister does not block the political peerage proposals of others — be it those from past prime ministers, or dubious Labour party leader nominations,” the insider said.
Truss’s list followed a row in June over her predecessor Boris Johnson’s resignation honours, in which seven of his nominations for peerages were approved. A further eight of his candidates were rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Commission.
The previous two Conservative prime ministers, Theresa May and David Cameron, appointed 19 and 16 peers respectively in their resignation lists, which included crossbenchers, figures from other parties as well as non-affiliated peers.
