On Monday we learned which candidate has won the Conservative Party leadership election.

Normally, politicians who have managed to scramble to the top of the political greasy pole are due congratulations, but in this particular case commiserations might be more appropriate. For Liz Truss is about to come into a fearsome inheritance.

There is no escaping the front and centre time-bomb she, and the rest of us, are facing – the cost of living crisis fuelled (if that’s the right word) by the spiralling cost of energy.

Throughout the campaign, Truss has had only one response when asked by Tory members how she intended to ensure that this winter people didn’t have to chose between eating and heating and nor would small and medium-sized businesses have to face the almost daily prospect of going under – tax cuts, she intones.

Almost every serious economist and economic think tank has said that this is the wrong answer. Truss talks about how tax cuts will lead to economic growth in the future but what we need to be hearing from her is how she intends to address the country’s economic woes next month, not next year. Indeed, many suggest that immediate tax cuts will simply exacerbate inflation, now predicted to rise to 18 per cent and even higher.

Linked to the cost of living crisis is the growing wave of strikes that are now spreading across all sections of the public and private sector, from dockers at Felixstowe, responsible for 40 per cent of our imports, to train workers, rubbish collectors, barristers – the list goes on. Everywhere there is discontent and it falls to our new PM to address it urgently.

Then there is the seemingly never-ending crisis in the health service. The looming threat of another Omicron wave, combined with a bad bout of the annual winter influenza epidemic, could leave the NHS in an even worse position this year as it was when hospitals struggled to cope with the first waves of the coronavirus pandemic, and all this without taking into account the threat of industrial action by nurses and junior hospitals doctors.

Then of course, Ms Truss, or less likely Mr Sunak, will have to contend with the war in Ukraine, now in its seventh month and with neither a negotiated or military ending in sight. Liz Truss faces two challenges on this front.

First, will be the extent to which she can maintain the country’s commitment to supporting Ukraine, despite mounting gas and electricity bills. That’s the relatively easy task.

The real challenge is playing her part in keeping the European coalition together which, to date, has played such a vital role in supporting Ukraine and isolating Russia. But not all European governments and populations have been as supportive of Ukraine as has been Britain. So Truss will have to do her utmost to ensure that the current coalition doesn’t begin to fragment.

One way of almost guaranteeing that it does, is the one that Truss appears to have embarked on and that is by doing her utmost to alienate our fellow Europeans.

This she is doing by restating, as she has been, our intention of pulling out of the Northern Ireland protocol almost as soon as she takes office. This is the agreement that ensures that goods to and from Europe flow freely into and out of the Province, a move that is likely to infuriate political leaders across the continent.

And if all this lot is not enough to make Ms Truss wonder why she applied for the job in the first place, she might ponder just how secure her position is within her own party.

Through the the run-off for this leadership contest Truss persistently trailed in terms of support from her fellow MPs.

In the first round only 50 of her 357 colleagues made her their first choice and in the final ballot she only secured the support of just one third of Tory MPs.

And then there lurks the figure of her predecessor, who is already dropping very heavy hints that he’s not going to do a Cameron and quietly depart the political stage.

So it’s far from impossible that come the next election, be it sooner or later, after Truss has led the Tories to defeat, she will be challenged and lose the leadership –and then, guess who will be waiting in the wings, to return to his “rightful place” as leader of the Party.

You have been warned.

Ivor Gaber is professor of political journalism at the University of Sussex and a former Westminster political correspondent