Liz Truss becomes UK Prime Minister after meeting the Queen following Boris Johnson’s resignation

Liz Truss - who until now was Britain’s Foreign Secretary - met the Queen at Balmoral in Scotland in a massive departure from tradition.

Liz Truss is now the UK’s Prime Minister after meeting the Queen.

Ms Truss, 47, will be handed the keys to 10 Downing Street, replacing Boris Johnson who tendered his resignation to Her Majesty earlier today.

She becomes the 16th PM of the Queen’s reign.

Ms Truss - who until now was Britain’s Foreign Secretary - met the Queen at Balmoral in Scotland in a massive departure from tradition.

Liz Truss has become UK Prime Minister after meeting the Queen

Liz Truss is now Prime Minister (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

For more than 100 years, the incoming PM has met the sovereign at Buckingham Palace in London - a short drive from Downing Street - to ‘kiss hands’.

But there were concerns that the Queen may not have been well enough to travel down to the capital from Scotland, so Ms Truss has met her at her summer residence instead.

The new PM will then fly back to London, where she will give a speech outside No 10 and set about building her Cabinet and tackling the cost of living crisis that will likely define her premiership.

Ms Truss beat former Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the Conservative Party’s leadership contest, which followed Mr Johnson’s decision to quit following a series of scandals.

But Mr Johnson hinted that he might not be gone for good in his final speech as PM.

For not the first time in his career, Mr Johnson compared himself to Cincinnatus.

“Like Cincinnatus I am returning to my plough,” he said.

“And I will be offering this government nothing but the most fervent support.”

Cincinnatus was a Roman consul in 460 BC, but when the next consul was besieged by a tribe two years later, he was called from his plough to return to fight them back.

Within 15 days, he had been made ‘dictator’, assembled an army, repelled the raiders and returned to his fields.

Boris Johnson arrives with his wife Carrie as he prepares to deliver a farewell address before his official resignation. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Mr Johnson will have known this, being an avid reader of the classics and a lover of Latin.

Whether or not he is implying he wants to return at a time of national crisis in the UK is unclear, although there are plenty within the party who believe he has a better chance of beating Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party at the next election than Ms Truss.

Mr Johnson also used his speech to say he would “hand over the baton” to Ms Truss “in what has unexpectedly turned out to be a relay race”.

“They changed the rules half-way through but never mind that now,” he said in a thinly veiled barb at the MPs who toppled him.

“I am now like one of those booster rockets that has fulfilled its function,” he continued.

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

“This is a tough time for the economy. This is a tough time for families up and down the country.

“We can and we will get through it and we will come out stronger the other side but I say to my fellow Conservatives it is time for the politics to be over folks, and it’s time for us all to get behind Liz Truss and her programme and deliver for the people of this country.”