A comeback attempt by Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, Liz Truss, could be off to a rocky start as several of her former Tory allies stayed away from her launch event on Tuesday and polls show she remains unpopular with the British public. 

Ms. Truss was on the job for 50 days in September-October 2022. Her comeback, launched as a libertarian and right-of-center “Popular Conservatism” platform, is facing criticism for the fact that Ms. Truss herself is unpopular with voters. 

Recent polling reported by HuffPost UK shows that Ms. Truss is the “least popular politician” that the polling firm, Savanta, asked  about, with 65 percent of voters having an unfavorable opinion and only 11 percent holding a favorable view of her. 

A political research director at Savanta, Chris Hopkins, said that the conservative ideas Ms. Truss stands for are well-liked, but she, as the figurehead of those ideas, is not. 

“Our research shows that many ideas associated with free market conservatism are popular with the UK public,” he said. “It is ironic that Popular Conservatism couldn’t find a more unpopular spokesperson if they actively tried.”

The “PopCon” movement launched during a London conference Tuesday, as the Sun reported ahead of it, and it’s headed by Mark Littlewood, who was behind Ms. Truss’ libertarian policies that received criticism during her brief tenure in 2022.  

“This is an enormous project and you know I’ve got a bit of a frog in my throat and a bit of a pit in my stomach having undertaken this huge task,” Mr. Littlewood told reporters at the event. “Some people have said to me ‘are you mad, setting up an organization where the two words are popular and conservatism?’ But I actually think conservatism is popular, and can be made popular among mass swathes of the electorate.” 

The movement is aiming for “a major institutional overhaul of the British machinery of government,” Mr. Littlewood added. 

“The system is pretty much rigged at the moment against achieving conservative ends,” he said, citing high tax rates, government spending, and debt. “We need a restoration and reset of how Britain works.” Ms. Truss said on Tuesday that “Britain is full of secret Conservatives.” She said the Tories “have not taken on the left-wing extremists,” The Daily Telegraph reported, and she added that they had been “swimming against the tide when we are talking about Conservative values.”