Liz Truss may have inherited an 80-seat House of Commons majority from Boris Johnson, but Britain’s incoming prime minister is facing a restive parliamentary party that may not be wholly behind her new agenda.

One of the first major challenges for Truss will be to shore up her position among the party’s 357 MPs, a majority of whom did not support her leadership bid. In her victory speech on Monday, Truss pledged to use “all the fantastic talents” across the party, including the “brilliant” MPs.

Although she won the leadership contest with 57 per cent of the vote, 14 percentage points ahead of her rival Rishi Sunak, Truss’s mandate from the party membership was not as large as some had predicted. “The result makes her job even harder,” said one supportive minister.