Who Is Liz Truss? / New Statesman June 2022
Liz Truss stood out as a student, says one of her Oxford tutors in the 1990s. She was an “creative” thinker who “looked at questions and problems in ways other people didn’t,” he tells me. “My overwhelming memory is of someone whose essays would be entirely unpredictable. Sometimes they would be fantastically brilliant and sometimes they were a bit off the wall.”
Truss displays similar characteristics as foreign secretary. Faced with the intractable problem of the Northern Ireland protocol, she has produced a solution more extreme than anything her hardline predecessor, David Frost, came up with: unilaterally scrapping large parts of that agreement even at the risk of triggering a trade war with the EU, undermining European unity against Russian aggression and trashing Britain’s reputation as a law-abiding nation.
She likewise broke with convention to secure Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release from Iran, a goal that had eluded her four predecessors. She enlisted Oman as an intermediary, paid a historic debt of $400 million, and cut a deal with Tehran that excluded an American hostage, Morad Tabhaz. According to one well-placed diplomatic source, she “pissed off” Washington.
Brilliant or off the wall? Bold or reckless? That depends who you ask.
To her right-wing admirers Truss is a second Margaret Thatcher - an image she does little to discourage. She is the product of a northern comprehensive school. Raised by Labour-supporting parents and a Liberal Democrat in her teens, she has since acquired a convert’s zeal for free markets, low taxes and small government. She is a scourge of wokery, political correctness and “fashionable” thinking.
Thick-skinned, intensely ambitious and often underestimated, she speaks her mind, breaks china and overrides Whitehall’s natural caution. She likes the fact that Britain is “raucous and rowdy”. She has described herself as a “disrupter-in-chief”. A former aide described her to me as “the most impressive person I ever worked with - so focussed, outcome orientated and visionary”. A senior Tory told me: “She’s someone you’d go tiger shooting with. She’s very gutsy, self assured, and tough when most other people would shy away.” She dresses - and acts - in bold colours, not pastel shades.
Those attributes have carried Truss far. In 2014 David Cameron appointed her Environment Secretary and, at 38, the youngest female member of a cabinet. She has since become the first female Lord Chancellor, and the first female Conservative Foreign Secretary. She is now the cabinet’s longest continuously-serving member, having served in six ministerial jobs under three prime ministers.
She is also a - possibly the - frontrunner to succeed Boris Johnson if and when the scandal-plagued prime minister is forced from office. “At the moment there’s a sense that there’s no-one else very senior who’s in front of her,” Paul Goodman, editor of the ConservativeHome website, says.
Unsurprisingly, in this polarised country, Truss’s detractors see her in a very different light, and shudder at the idea of her becoming Britain’s next prime minister.
They regard her as an intellectual lightweight who parrots cod-Thatcherite mantras; as a relentless leaker and self-promoter who practises tabloid diplomacy; and as a shameless political opportunist who morphed from committed Remainer to hardline Brexiteer to advance her leadership ambitions. She calls for global alliances while simultaneously backing Britain’s departure from the EU, and preaches free trade while supporting Britain’s withdrawal from the world’s largest free trade area.
Her critics scoff at the Thatcher comparison. They say she lacks the gravitas, vision and principle. Thatcher “was in an entirely different league,” snorts a former civil servant who worked with the Iron Lady. “She’s doing a pretty good job of self-promotion, if not of being foreign secretary,” a veteran diplomat protests.
And to return to her tutor’s point, another former aide told me how her mathematical brain pursues ideas to their logical conclusion until you “see civil servants eyes widening as they think ‘Oh my God! Does she really want to do this?”.
In similar vein Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief strategist, has famously described Truss as a “human hand grenade” who was “as close to properly crackers as anybody I have met in parliament”. In his view, and this is saying something, she would be “even worse” than Johnson as prime minister
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Truss was born in Oxford in 1975, the second of five siblings and only girl. Her father, John, was a maths professor. Her mother, Priscilla, was a nurse and teacher. Both were “to the left of Labour”, she says.
When she was four the family moved to Paisley, near Glasgow, where her father taught at the technology college. Her mother took her to CND protests, and on anti-Thatcher demonstrations where she chanted “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, ooot, ooot, ooot!”. In 1983 Truss volunteered to play Thatcher in mock hustings at her primary school and secured zero votes.
After a brief sojourn in Canada in the late 1980s Truss’s father became a professor at Leeds University and the family settled in the city’s middle-class suburb of Roundhay.
Truss says she went to a “genuine comprehensive”, though Roundhay School was a former grammar school of some repute and still had academic streaming. She claims the teachers were “bolshie” left-wingers who denounced Thatcher, preferred lessons about racism and sexism to English or Maths, and failed to push their students. “I simply don’t recognise her description of the school,” says William Thirsk-Gaskill, an IT consultant who attended it shortly before Truss.
Truss says the teachers also regarded applying for Oxbridge as a “snobby thing to do”, but that did not stop her securing a place at Merton College, Oxford, to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
There she became a Liberal Democrat, albeit a radical one. She joined demonstrations against the British National Party in East London, and a mass trespass at Twyford Down to protest against Tory legislation curbing civil liberties. A columnist in Cherwell, the student newspaper, called her “Liz ‘PC’s her middle name’ Truss”.
As president of Oxford’s Liberal Democrats she brazenly challenged Paddy Ashdown, the party’s leader, at its 1994 autumn conference. She proposed a motion to abolish the monarchy. Ashdown was aghast. An aide brokered a meeting at which Ashdown believed Truss had agreed to make her speech then remit the motion to avoid a vote.
Truss duly spoke, declaring: “We Liberal Democrats believe in opportunity for all. We do not believe people are born to rule.” But she failed to remit the motion. Ashdown stormed from the stage “absolutely effing and blinding”, the aide told me. “She had significant balls even that long ago.”
By the time Truss graduated in 1996 she had joined the Conservative Party, then deeply unpopular after 17 years in power. She says she did so because of her growing belief in individualism and self-reliance. She also met Tories for the first time and realised “they don’t have two heads and don’t eat babies”.
Her father was “horrified”, though her mother has since campaigned for her. He joined an anti-Brexit march in 2016, and e-mails her about policies he finds objectionable. “My Dad is still struggling. Sometimes he thinks I’m a sleeper working from inside to overthrow the regime,” she told Nick Robinson’s Inside Politics podcast.
Truss met Hugh O’Leary, an accountant, at the 1997 Conservative Party conference. They married in 2000. They now live in a Greenwich townhouse, where Truss keeps a Union flag for use in interviews, and have two teenage daughters, Frances and Liberty, who attend a selective state school.
She seldom speaks about her family, but associates say that her husband has “always been an important sounding board” and “she’s beyond insanely proud of her kids”. When she has time she bikes with them, or helps them with their homework. Once a week, for a treat, they enjoy a Deliveroo meal together.
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From Oxford Truss went to work first for Shell, then Cable and Wireless, while simultaneously pursuing a political career. In 2001, aged 26, she fought the safe Labour seat of Hemsworth in West Yorkshire. In 2005 she stood in the more marginal West Yorkshire constituency of Calder Valley, losing by just 1,367 votes. She was also a Greenwich councillor, and deputy director of the centre-right think tank Reform.
Following the Conservatives’ 2005 defeat Cameron set out to “modernise” the party. Truss, a young, northern, state-educated woman, was put on the candidates’ ‘A’ list, and adopted for the safe Tory seat of South West Norfolk.
There was a hitch when her constituency association learned that she had had an extra-marital affair with Mark Field, a Conservative MP who had mentored her. Some members, dubbed the ‘Turnip Taleban’, demanded her deselection. She fought back, defeating a motion to remove her by 132 votes to 37. “It was a baptism of fire,” she said later. “And actually, even though it was a really unpleasant thing to go through, it made me stronger.” Her marriage survived. Field’s did not.
Truss was elected to parliament with a 13,000 majority in 2010. “She hit the ground running,” says a contemporary. She founded the Free Enterprise Group of MPs championing deregulation and lower taxes. She co-authored Britannia Unchained, a paean to free market economics that called the British “the worst idlers in the world”.
She wrote it with five other members of the 2010 Tory intake including Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab - all now cabinet ministers and ideological allies. Asked if she had any Labour friends, a source close to Truss thought hard before remembering that she has a jogging partner “not of the Tory persuasion”.
Within two years Truss was named the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year. The Times labelled her a “leading backbench voice on policy”. She impressed both Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor, and was appointed a junior education minister.
The job played to her interests. She fought to improve maths teaching, a personal hobby horse, and banned calculators for primary school exams. But her efforts to reduce childcare costs were blocked by Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister.
In 2014 she joined the cabinet as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs - a job that suited her less well. Aides say she coped with massive floods, persuaded the US to lift bans on British beef and lamb, and promoted exports - lobbying British embassies to serve British food. They say she mastered complex briefs and worked hard to make the civil service machine deliver for her, even reading Civil Service World.
Others have different recollections. “She gave no indication of being interested in one of the most exciting briefs in government,” says Shaun Spiers, then head of the Council for the Protection of Rural England. A senior environment correspondent for a national newspaper agrees: “She didn’t seem to have any ideas. She just seemed to be keeping the seat warm.”
Her two-year tenure is remembered primarily for a speech to the Tories’ 2014 party conference that even a former adviser describes as “epically bad”. Truss bemoaned the fact that Britain imports two-thirds of the cheese it consumes. “That. Is. A. Disgrace,” she declared to a bemused audience while mangling her timing, pitch and facial expressions.
She has improved, but neither public speaking nor broadcast interviews are her forte, colleagues admit. She has a slightly metallic voice. She can appear awkward, sometimes invading people’s personal space. But in private, they say, she is funny, irreverent and capable of charm. She lets her hair down with karaoke sessions at Christmas parties or leaving dos. “She has a spectacularly bad voice,” says a former adviser. “She loves classic pop songs, but my God she can murder them.”
Truss also has phenomenal energy. “We’re constantly knackered, trailing in her wake. She’s indefatigable…She eats, sleeps and drinks the job,” says one of her Foreign Office team (known internally as the ‘Court of Queen Liz’). He remembers her writing a major speech at midnight after 17 hours of gruelling trade negotiations in Tokyo.
She fuels herself with double expressos, burritos and meatball subs. “I’ve never seen a human being drink more expressos in a day,” says the former adviser. “And I never ceased to be amazed at how many carbs she could eat without putting on a pound. She must have the metabolic rate of a Tasmanian Devil.”
One momentous event occurred during Truss’s days as Environment Secretary: the 2016 Brexit referendum. Cameron acknowledged in his memoirs that she was “wavering” on the issue, but she backed his Remain campaign and argued the case for continued EU membership with apparent conviction.
Vote Remain “if you care about being an outward-facing, internationally-focussed country,” she declared. “We would be stronger, safer and better off in a reformed Europe,” she insisted. EU membership magnified Britain’s global influence. “When you are speaking for 500 million people that really carries weight,” said Truss, who even signed a declaration with Labour’s Ed Milliband and the Liberal Democrats’ Ed Davey calling Leave campaigners “extreme and outdated”.
It is hard to square those views with the Brexit cheerleader Truss is now. In a keynote speech to Chatham House last December she stated: “After almost 50 years in the EU, once again all the levers of international policy are in our hands - diplomacy, development, trade and security…As an outward-looking sovereign nation, we are rebuilding our muscle to fulfill the promise of Global Britain - ready to win the future for our country and win the future for freedom.”
One explanation for her Damascene conversion is that she backed Remain only out of deference to Cameron and Osborne. “She would have to have felt very strongly to have flouted them, and she didn’t,” said Goodman. “She was always a reluctant Remainer,” said a source close to Truss.
The less charitable explanation is that she realised, post-referendum, that her political ambitions were dead unless she rapidly became a born-again Brexiteer. Mujtaba Rahman, a leading Brexit analyst who runs the Eurasia Group in Europe, told me: “I don’t think she’s a Leaver or Remainer. I think she’s hugely opportunistic and is really looking at the quickest and most effective way to land the job at Number Ten.” A former ambassador was even blunter. “You can’t be a member of Team Boris unless you go all along with all the Brexit mythology and bollocks.”
In interviews, Truss claims to have changed her mind on the questionable grounds that Brexit’s benefits have become clearer while the “portents of doom” have failed to materialise.
Theresa May replaced Cameron as prime minister following the referendum and promoted Truss to Justice Secretary. It proved a poisoned chalice. Truss had no legal background. She was not of the establishment. The national mood was sulphurous, and the government clashed repeatedly with the judiciary over its attempts to implement Brexit.
Those tensions erupted in November 2016 when the Daily Mail called three top judges “Enemies of the People” for ruling that the government required the consent of a mutinous parliament before notifying Brussels of Britain’s intention to leave the EU.
The judiciary demanded Truss defend its independence. Number Ten refused to let her do so. “She had two choices and both were shit,” says a former aide. To defy Number Ten and condemn the Mail would have been “rapidly career-ending”, but failure to do so would have ruptured her relations with the judiciary.
Truss sought a middle way, arguing that press freedom was as important as judicial independence, but the judiciary never forgave her. A few months later May demoted Truss, making her Chief Secretary to the Treasury. “It was one of the few times that I saw her characteristic optimism falter,” Kirsty Buchanan, her special adviser at that time, wrote later.
Truss is nothing if not resilient, however. The self-styled “economics geek” was in her element at the Treasury, and rebounded as a fully-fledged fiscal hawk and libertarian.
In a speech to the London School of Economics she lauded Britain as a “nation of AirBnB-ing, Deliveroo-eating, Uber-riding freedom fighters”. She rebuked cabinet colleagues, saying: “It’s not macho just to demand more money. It’s much tougher to demand better value and challenge the blob of vested interests within your department.” She even poked fun at Michael Gove, then Environment Secretary: “Too often we’re hearing about not drinking too much, eating too many doughnuts, or enjoying the warmth of our wood-burning Goves…I mean stoves.” She added: “There’s enough hot air and smoke at the environment department already.”
Truss was reprimanded by May, but the prime minister was by then a spent force. Truss started posting pictures of herself on social media, sitting in Tornado jets or whizzing down zip wires, suggesting she had begun to see herself as a potential successor. In the event she became the first cabinet minister to back Johnson’s successful leadership bid after May resigned in May 2019.
Johnson liked her positivity and boosterism, and made her International Trade Secretary. For two years she flew around the world, striking trade deals and posting endless photos of herself - usually posing with foreign counterparts in front of the Union flag. Tory party members repeatedly voted her the most popular member of the cabinet in ConservativeHome’s monthly surveys.
Critics say the deals mostly replicated the trading arrangements Britain enjoyed as an EU member (her ministry was dubbed ‘the Department for Cut and Paste’). “She got trade deals rolled over and managed to portray that as a great triumph for the post-Brexit world,” a former Conservative minister says. Moreover the deals did not begin to compensate for Britain’s departure from the single market. Nor did they include the Brexiteers’ promised deal with the US.
Truss simultaneously served, and still serves, as minister for women and equalities - a role she uses to bash political correctness. She rejects quotas, unconscious bias training, diversity statements and virtue signalling. The goal should be equal opportunities, not equal outcomes, she argues.
Last September Johnson promoted Truss to Foreign Secretary, and put her in charge of renegotiating the Northern Ireland protocol following David Frost’s resignation.
Foreign Secretary was perhaps not a job she coveted. Rory Stewart, the former Tory minister, told me: “I remember Liz Truss once saying to me something like ‘Rory I cannot understand why you are so interested in foreign affairs. The very last thing I would like to be is Foreign Secretary’. As often with Liz I couldn’t quite tell if she was joking.”
But for better or worse (after sparring with Rabb over the use of the foreign secretary’s country retreat at Chevening) she has thrown herself into it, setting out her stall in that Chatham House speech three months after taking office.
Britain had to “dump the baggage, ditch the introspection and step forward,” she declared. “The greatest country on earth” should lead a “global network of liberty” against the “maelstrom of militancy, mistrust and misinformation” deployed by authoritarian regimes, she proclaimed. She used the words “freedom” and “liberty” nearly 20 times in a speech that verged on jingoism and one former ambassador described to me as “toe-curlingly awful”.
The Ukraine war has been grist to her mill. She has demanded total sanctions on Russia and ever heavier weaponry for Ukraine because “this is a time for courage, not for caution”. She encouraged British volunteers to join the fight (before being slapped down by Number Ten). She wants more defence spending because “bullies respond only to strength”. She insists that Russia must be defeated - utterly - not appeased. At one point the Kremlin blamed her hawkishness for its decision to put its nuclear arsenal on alert.
Her approach is “symptomatic of her broader world view and where she thinks Britain should be in the world, which is basically at the front of the peleton,” says an aide. Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, reached a different conclusion, observing: “This must be the first Tory leadership contest fought on the frontiers of Russia.” In an e-mail, a top diplomat deplores her “excessive stridency about Ukraine, cultivating illusions about the outcome”.
Fuelling suspicions that Truss is using the conflict for political advantage, she has posed for Thatcher-esque photographs in a tank in Estonia, and wearing a fur hat in Moscow’s Red Square. Unlike previous foreign secretaries, she always has a photographer or videographer in tow. She’s always photographed, wherever the hell she is,” says a source who follows her closely.
By contrast Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, has been markedly more measured, and his comprehensive demolition of Putin’s historical claim to Ukraine had foreign ambassadors wondering why the Foreign Office had not produced such a document.
Truss’s handling of the Northern Ireland protocol negotiations has likewise raised suspicions that she is “on manoeuvres” lest Johnson falls.
Initially she was conciliatory, inviting her EU interlocutor, Maros Sefcovic, to Chevening - playing post-dinner billiards and walking in the gardens with him as she attempted to build a rapport. Six months on she has embraced the purist, uncompromising position of the European Research Group (ERG) despite deep concerns in Whitehall, the cabinet and even Number Ten.
Sources close to Truss blame EU intransigence for her transformation. “Liz came up against a brick wall,” says one. Goodman told me: “Politicians are warriors or healers. She’s a warrior. I think she reached the conclusion after some early diplomacy that this is an issue on which the government has to fight.”
Her critics perceive other motives. “She’s had a look at the political calculation,” said a former Tory minister. Courting the ERG “makes sense for her because I don’t think she has a naturally large constituency in the Conservative parliamentary party. There aren’t a vast number of people pushing her interests, but if she can win over the ERG it could be really hard to stop her.”
Unilaterally rewriting whole chunks of the Brexit treaty is a high-risk strategy that could trigger a trade war in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. “She must appreciate how this could go horribly wrong,” said the former minister, but “she may think a vacancy for the leadership of the Conservative Party will emerge sooner than the consequences”.
Truss’s allies flatly deny she is eyeing Number Ten. They insist she’s totally loyal to Johnson (she has criticised none of his many transgressions). “She’s 100 per cent focussed on being foreign secretary,” says one. “I reject any sense that there’s leadership manoeuvering. It’s totally for the birds.”
But her courting of MPs at ‘Fizz with Liz’ receptions, her assiduous posting of action photographs of herself, and the judicious leaking of her opposition to Covid curbs and tax rises all suggest otherwise. “She’s looking for every photo-op in the book. She’s very happy to do ‘Global Britain’ and stuff it to the Europeans. She’s running, and playing to the gallery,” a former ambassador said. Given the precariousness of Johnson’s position it would be surprising were she not.
Conservative leadership elections are notoriously fickle, but should Johnson be forced from office in the near future Truss would probably be the favoured candidate of right-wing Tory MPs, and that would could well be sufficient to secure her one of the two places in the final ballot of the party’s 200,000 members. Being popular with the grassroots, she would have a good chance of winning that ballot.
Whether, after 12 years of Tory rule, Truss and her robust right-wing views would appeal to the national electorate is another matter. She is neither a natural communicator, obviously charismatic or well-known, and a YouGov poll earlier this year showed just 18 per cent of respondents liked her.
A lot of Conservatives would also worry about this woman of “brilliant” or “off the wall” ideas. A Downing Street insider, noting her strident rhetoric on Ukraine, recently declared himself mightily relieved she was not Prime Minister because “she might start a nuclear war”.