biography liz truss

Who Is Liz Truss?

Oxford-born Liz Truss began her political rise as a Conservative MP from South West Norfolk in 2010. She became the youngest female cabinet member in British history in 2014, the first female lord chancellor in 2016 and the first female Conservative foreign secretary in 2021. Truss won her party's race to replace U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson in September 2022, but her tenure was marred by ill-fated economic proposals. She announced her resignation just six weeks later.

How Old Is Liz Truss?

Mary Elizabeth Truss was born in Oxford, England, on July 26, 1975.

Early Years and Education

Following another year abroad in British Columbia, Canada, Truss returned to England to attend the comprehensive Roundhay School in Leeds. Although she later criticized her educational experience at Roundhay, her sterling grades resulted in acceptance to the University of Oxford's Merton College.

An ardent member and eventual president of Oxford's Liberal Democrats, Truss advocated for the legalization of cannabis and famously denounced the monarchy in one speech. She also was involved with Oxford's Hayek Society, which celebrated the work of Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek, before graduating in 1996 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.

Early Career

Truss joined Shell as a graduate trainee in 1996 and settled in as a commercial manager for the energy giant. She then moved on to the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless, where she served as economics director until her departure in 2005.

Her political ambitions crystalizing, Truss became deputy director of the public services think tank Reform from 2008-10, during which time she contributed to papers about educational and economic policy.

Member of Parliament

After switching to the Conservative Party in 1996, Truss unsuccessfully ran for the House of Commons as a candidate from Hemsworth in 2001 and Calder Valley in 2005. She became a councillor for Eltham South in 2006 and finally won a coveted MP seat from South West Norfolk in 2010 after weathering reports of her affair with a political mentor.

Truss soon formed the Free Enterprise Group among like-minded MPs, who caused a stir with a 2012 publication, Britannia Unchained , that accused British workers of being "among the worst idlers in the world." Around that time, she was appointed under secretary of state for education and childcare and further boosted her profile with a publicized trip to Shanghai in early 2014 to investigate how Chinese children performed so well in math and science.

Cabinet Roles

In July 2014, the 38-year-old Truss became the youngest female cabinet member in British history with her appointment as secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs. Although she sought to draw more tech-minded employees to the food industry, she perhaps was best known during this time for emphatically declaring the U.K.'s importing of cheese to be a "disgrace." Truss also used her platform to push for the U.K. to " remain " in the European Union, before later changing sides to champion the Brexit cause.

Truss broke down another barrier by becoming the first official female lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice in July 2016. However, her time in the department was short-lived after struggling to defend the judiciary from tabloid attacks. Moving on to chief secretary to the treasury the following year, she found a better home for her free-market ideals and cultivated a regular presence on social media.

Named the secretary of state for international trade and president of the Board of Trade in August 2019, Truss successfully negotiated post-Brexit deals with more than five dozen countries. She also became the minister for women and equalities during this time, though she was accused of both shirking the responsibilities of the position and a disregard for transgender rights .

Another cabinet shuffle in September 2021 made Truss the first female member of her party to hold the post of secretary of state for foreign, Commonwealth and development affairs. Along with taking a tough stance on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Truss negotiated the safe return of British-Iranian nationals Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori to their families, but also threatened upheaval with her stated desire to revisit the Northern Ireland protocol.

Three days after U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation on July 7, 2022, Truss threw her hat into the ring to become the Conservative Party leader and new prime minister until the next general election. Although she consistently trailed former Finance Minister Rishi Sunak after several rounds of voting among Conservative MPs, 57 percent of the party's rank-and-file favored the foreign secretary, and on September 5, 2022, Truss was declared the winner of the race.

Prime Minister

Shortly after formally accepting the prime minister role in what turned out to be Queen Elizabeth II's final royal engagement , Truss drew praise for her public composure as the world mourned the death of the longest-serving British monarch.

From there, things rapidly went downhill for the new premier. Following her promise to cap household energy bills for two years, the tax cuts presented in Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng's " mini-budget " spooked investors to the point where the Bank of England stepped in to steady skyrocketing interest rates and the plummeting British pound.

Truss subsequently scrapped the planned tax cuts for top earners and corporations and forced Kwarteng to resign in mid-October. However, new Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt further gutted her agenda by eliminating the basic income tax rate reduction and shortening the energy-bill freeze from two years to six months.

The chaos continued when Home Secretary Suella Braverman admitted to using a personal email for official correspondence and tendered her resignation on October 19. Later that day, a motion to vote on a government fracking bill in the House of Commons reportedly resulted in Conservative MPs bullying colleagues to support the measure.

Resignation

On October 20, 2022, Truss announced that she was stepping down as leader of the Conservative Party and would relinquish her role as prime minister when a replacement was chosen.

Acknowledging her missteps "at a time of great economic and international instability," she declared she "cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party."

Truss's resignation announcement came on her 45th day in office, giving her the shortest tenure of any UK prime minister.

Husband and Children

Truss met accountant Hugh O'Leary at a Conservative Party conference in 1997. They survived an awkward first date in which he sprained his ankle and were married in 2000, their union producing daughters Liberty and Frances.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 1975
• Birth date: July 26, 1975
• Birth City: Oxford
• Birth Country: England
• Best Known For: Liz Truss became the United Kingdom's shortest-serving prime minister when she resigned after less than two months in the role in October 2022.
• Politics and Government
• Astrological Sign: Leo
• University of Oxford
• Roundhay School In Leeds
• Interesting Facts
• Truss has said her political hero is former U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
• Occupations
• Political Figure

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Liz Truss Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/political-figure/mary-elizabeth-truss
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 28, 2022
• Original Published Date: October 28, 2022
• We import two-thirds of our cheese. That is a disgrace.
• I recognize though, given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party.
• My mum was a member of the CND and I have memories of going on marches with her when I was a child, so I suppose I had an awareness of and an interest in politics from quite an early age.

Famous Political Figures

10 of the First Black Women in Congress

Kamala Harris

Deb Haaland

Why Lewis Strauss Didn’t Like Oppenheimer

Madeleine Albright

These Are the Major 2024 Presidential Candidates

Hillary Clinton

Indira Gandhi

Toussaint L'Ouverture

Vladimir Putin

Kevin McCarthy

Cookies on GOV.UK

We use some essential cookies to make this website work.

We’d like to set additional cookies to understand how you use GOV.UK, remember your settings and improve government services.

We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services.

You have accepted additional cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.

You have rejected additional cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time.

The Rt Hon Elizabeth Truss MP

Elizabeth Truss was Prime Minister from 6 September 2022 to 25 October 2022. She was previously Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs from 15 September 2021. She was appointed Minister for Women and Equalities on 10 September 2019. She was elected as the Conservative MP for south west Norfolk in 2010.

Elizabeth studied philosophy, politics and economics at Merton College, Oxford.

Political career

Elizabeth entered Parliament in 2010. She was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education and Childcare in September 2012. Elizabeth served as the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from July 2014 until July 2016.

Elizabeth was Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice from July 2016 until June 2017. She was Chief Secretary to the Treasury from June 2017 until July 2019.

Career outside politics

Elizabeth was previously Deputy Director at Reform. She also worked in the energy and telecommunications industry for 10 years as a commercial manager and economics director, and is a qualified management accountant.

Personal life

Elizabeth is married with 2 children.

Follow Liz Truss on Twitter: @trussliz and on LinkedIn .

Previous roles in government

• 2022 to 2022
• 2021 to 2022
• 2019 to 2022
• 2019 to 2021
• 2017 to 2019
• 2016 to 2017
• 2014 to 2016
• 2012 to 2014

Announcements

Subscriptions.

• 29 August 2023
• Policy paper
• 29 June 2023
• 28 February 2023
• 21 November 2022
• 25 October 2022
• 20 October 2022
• 19 October 2022
• Press release
• 14 October 2022
• Correspondence

Is this page useful?

• Yes this page is useful
• No this page is not useful

Help us improve GOV.UK

Don’t include personal or financial information like your National Insurance number or credit card details.

To help us improve GOV.UK, we’d like to know more about your visit today. We’ll send you a link to a feedback form. It will take only 2 minutes to fill in. Don’t worry we won’t send you spam or share your email address with anyone.

Who is Liz Truss? Britain's next PM is popular with her party — but what about voters?

Expect 'a lot of fireworks, and a lot of controversy and a lot of action,' says acquaintance and commentator.

Social Sharing

As a child, Liz Truss marched in demonstrations against Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. As an adult, she came to admire Britain's first female leader — and now she is about to enter 10 Downing Street with a Thatcherite zeal to transform the U.K. after winning the race to succeed Boris Johnson.

The party said Truss, Britain's current foreign secretary, won about 57 per cent of Conservative members' votes, compared with about 43 per cent for ex-treasury chief Rishi Sunak.

Truss, 47, will become Britain's third female prime minister, after Thatcher, who governed from 1979 to 1990, and Theresa May, who held office from 2016 to 2019.

• Liz Truss vows tax cuts as next British PM after winning Conservative leadership

Fellow party members have embraced Truss's vows to slash taxes and red tape and keep up Britain's staunch support for Ukraine. But to critics, she is an inflexible ideologue whose right-wing policies won't help Britain weather the economic turmoil set off by the pandemic, Brexit and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Mark Littlewood, a libertarian commentator who has known Truss since their university days, said she's less a conservative than a "radical" who — like Thatcher — wants to "roll back the intervention of the state" in people's lives.

"I'm expecting a lot of fireworks, and a lot of controversy and a lot of action," he said.

• WATCH | Truss vows to help people in Britain who are reeling from inflation: 

Liz Truss promises 'bold plan' as new U.K. Conservative Party leader

'headstrong and determined and outspoken'.

Born in Oxford in 1975, Mary Elizabeth Truss is the daughter of a math professor and a nurse who took her on anti-nuclear and anti-Thatcher protests as a child, where she recalled shouting: "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie — out, out, out!"

In a 2018 speech, she said she began developing her own political views early, "arguing against my socialist parents in our left-wing household."

After attending public high school, Truss went on to Oxford University, where she studied philosophy, politics and economics — the degree of choice for many aspiring politicians — and was president of the university branch of the Liberal Democratic Party. The economically centrist Lib Dems back constitutional reform and civil liberties, and Truss was an enthusiastic member, putting up "Free the Weed" posters that called for decriminalization of marijuana and arguing in a speech for the abolition of the monarchy.

Littlewood, who was a fellow member of the Oxford Lib Dems and now heads the Institute for Economic Affairs, a free-market think-tank, remembers Truss as "headstrong, and determined and outspoken."

"You were never in any doubt where she stood on an issue or a person," he said.

Anti-Brexit but called herself 'euroskeptic'

After Oxford, Truss joined the Conservative Party "when it was distinctly unfashionable," she later said.

She worked as an economist for energy company Shell and telecommunications firm Cable and Wireless, and for a right-of-centre think-tank while becoming involved in Conservative politics and espousing free market Thatcherite views. She ran unsuccessfully for Parliament twice before getting elected to represent the eastern England seat of Southwest Norfolk in 2010.

She founded the Free Enterprise group of Thatcherite Tory lawmakers who produced "Britannia Unchained," a political treatise that notoriously included the claim that British workers are "among the worst idlers in the world."

In Britain's 2016 referendum on whether to leave the European Union, Truss backed the losing "remain" side, though she says she was always a natural euroskeptic. Since the vote, she has won over Brexiteers with her uncompromising approach to the EU.

She became justice secretary, but was demoted by May to a more junior role in the Treasury in 2017. When May was toppled by her repeated failure to break a political deadlock over Brexit, Truss was an early backer of Johnson to replace her. When he won, Johnson made Truss trade secretary, a role in which she used Instagram to get recognition around the world, signing post-Brexit trade deals and raising her profile.

Mixed reviews as foreign secretary

In September 2021, she was appointed foreign secretary, Britain's top diplomat. Her performance has drawn mixed reviews. Many praise her firm response to the invasion of Ukraine and she secured the release of two British citizens jailed in Iran, where her predecessors had failed.

But EU leaders and officials who hoped she would bring a softer tone to Britain's relations with the bloc have been disappointed. Amid trade wrangling, Truss introduced legislation to rip up parts of the binding U.K.-EU divorce agreement signed by both sides. The 27-nation bloc is taking legal action against Britain in return.

Truss's perceived loyalty to Johnson, who remains popular with many Tories, also helped her win the leadership. Many party members cited Sunak's decision to quit Johnson's cabinet in July as a mark against him. Truss didn't resign, saying she was a "loyal person" — though she had been courting party members for months at "fizz with Liz" events to build support for a potential leadership bid.

• From home heating to beer, staggering energy costs are fuelling Britain's inflation crisis
• Analysis As Britain awaits a new prime minister, its cost-of-living crisis mounts

The wider British electorate is likely to prove a harder audience to win over. Times are tough and getting tougher as inflation soars and Britain's cost-of-living crisis worsens. Truss's focus on stimulating the economy through tax cuts is unlikely to provide much short-term relief.

And she doesn't have long to persuade voters that she is on the right track. The next national election must be held in two years.

Related Stories

• In a 1st, the Queen will not return to London to receive Boris Johnson and his successor

Who is Liz Truss? The prime minister who sees herself as disruptor-in-chief

As Liz Truss enters Downing Street, Tamara Cohen looks at her surprise ascent. Her story has taken her from Liberal Democrat to Tory, Remainer to Brexit enthusiast, awkward speaker to "queen of Instagram", as a colleague put it. She has made her own luck in this contest.

Political correspondent @tamcohen

Monday 5 September 2022 15:24, UK

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

A young Liz Truss could hardly have imagined walking through the famous black door of Number Ten as a Conservative prime minister.

After a political journey that has taken her from Liberal Democrat to Tory, Remainer to Brexit enthusiast, awkward speaker to "queen of Instagram", as a colleague put it, she has made her own luck in this contest.

The long-serving cabinet minister had a slow start in the early rounds of voting with MPs, but her optimistic outlook - which her critics say defies reality - and plan to overturn conventional thinking on the economy have won over party members.

Truss will go 'bigger than expected' on energy - politics live updates

But it's now voters she will need to convince, during an unprecedented cost of living squeeze . What does Ms Truss believe, and what kind of prime minister might she be?

David Gauke first crossed paths with Ms Truss in the 1990s when both were Conservative activists, and they later served in cabinet together during the turbulent Brexit battles.

"I think Liz has always been ambitious, she's always been someone who has said to herself, 'Well why not me, why can't I make it to the very top?'" he said.

More on Liz Truss

Liz Truss refuses to apologise for sparking mortgage rate rise - but admits one failing as PM

Adam Boulton: What Liz Truss and Donald Trump have in common

Liz Truss's book Ten Years To Save The West in breach of rules in place on minister's memoirs

Related Topics:

Unlike Boris Johnson, he said, she believes in "straightforward Conservative values" such as a smaller state, but is also "an outsider" with a disregard for expert advice.

Ms Truss has vowed to cut taxes , despite concerns about inflation, and challenge economic policies which she says for 20 years have failed to deliver growth.

"She's always been suspicious about the state intervening too much," Mr Gauke said.

"Her temperament is one that is suspicious of establishment. I think she tends to think there is too much power in the hands of risk averse, what she would consider to be defeatist, establishment figures, and that you've got to be bold, and you've got to be brave and you've sometimes got to take on expert opinion.

"I think that's going to be an attribute of her time in government and it's one that I have some worries about."

Mary Elizabeth Truss was born to left-wing parents in Oxford in 1975, the eldest of four siblings. When she was four, the family moved to Paisley, near Glasgow, where her father John, a mathematics professor, was working.

Her mother Priscilla, a nurse, was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and took a young Liz on "ban the bomb" marches where she has spoken of chanting anti-Margaret Thatcher slogans.

Ms Truss has described her parents as "to the left of Labour" and says that although her mother now supports her campaign, she's not sure her father would vote for her.

The family later settled in the affluent Roundhay area of Leeds, living in a row of now smart Edwardian terraces, where she attended Roundhay school, a state comprehensive that she has claimed let pupils down through "low expectations". She credits the experience with inspiring her to go into politics.

Former pupils do not remember her as a strong personality. One who was in the same class said she was "extremely clever and generally regarded as a 'swot' in the terminology of the 1980s and 1990s". A former teacher at the school said she was "clever, but you wouldn't have marked her out".

The school sent a small number of pupils to Oxbridge every year at the time, and she won a place to study politics, philosophy and economics at Merton College, Oxford.

She has described herself during the campaign as a "plain-speaking Yorkshirewoman".

Student radical

Drawn into politics as a student, Ms Truss became president of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats and campaigned to abolish the monarchy.

To the dismay of Paddy Ashdown, the party leader, she moved a motion at the party's annual conference in Brighton in 1994, declaring "we Liberal Democrats do not believe people are born to rule."

David Laws, later a cabinet minister in the coalition government, was then a junior adviser to Ashdown and said: "I remember Paddy pacing up and down the press room in Brighton and saying, 'Oh my God, if this motion that Liz is moving, gets passed, that would be the end of the Liberal Democrats'."

By the time she graduated in 1996, Ms Truss had moved towards the Conservatives, and went to work at Shell and later in government relations for Cable & Wireless.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, the company's chairman at the time and a former Labour defence minister, remembers her ambition when the Conservatives were in the doldrums.

"She was very interested in politics and was a Tory, and I encouraged her to go for a seat," he told Sky News. "She was smart and fresh-thinking; I said the Conservative Party needs people like you."

After unsuccessfully contesting two seats in West Yorkshire in 2001 and 2005, she was picked out by David Cameron's "A list" and was selected for the safe seat of Southwest Norfolk in 2009. By then, she had married Hugh O'Leary, an accountant, and had two young daughters.

Members of the local party tried to have Ms Truss, then 34, deselected for failing to declare an earlier affair with Mark Field, a married Conservative MP.

Her battle with party members in the rural constituency - whom newspapers nicknamed the "Turnip Taliban" - made national headlines for weeks. She eventually won them over in a vote and held on to the seat, but the experience nearly derailed her career.

Lord Robertson added: "She's obviously a fighter, she showed real grit when they took her on, and there was an element of prejudice there."

In government

Ms Truss started climbing the ministerial ladder in 2012 as a junior education minister - and tried to push through some controversial reforms to childcare.

Mr Laws, then schools minister in that department, found her determined to drive her ideas through - whatever the criticism.

"I always found Liz to be a very engaging minister, somebody was pleasant to work with," he said.

"But she isn't necessarily one of the world's best listeners. She tends to speak at people and over them rather than listening to their views."

On one occasion, he said, she asked civil servants to draw up a list of staff-to-child ratios at nurseries in other countries to support her proposals. But he says the list they produced did not support her view that Britain was an outlier. "She asked the civil servants to delete that bit from the briefing," Mr Laws said.

He recalled her manner when she travelled to Moscow in February as foreign secretary: "I remember her having that meeting with [Sergey] Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and he described it as a dialogue of the deaf.

"While I've got no sympathy obviously with the Russians, I can imagine how that must have been… she sort of ploughs on and on and on. I had to smile."

As environment secretary, her first cabinet post, she became known for an awkward speech in which she described Britain's cheese imports as "a disgrace".

But more revealing are her speeches and articles campaigning for Britain to remain in the EU alongside Mr Cameron and George Osborne in 2016.

"It's in all of our interests to communicate the real impact on the ground… on jobs on livelihoods, because what we know is less trade would mean fewer and fewer investments," she told an audience at the Food and Drink Federation.

Her change of heart on Brexit, and, as trade secretary, energetic pursuit of deals, many of them rolled over from Britain's EU membership, attracted admirers from the right of the party.

As foreign secretary, she has taken a hard line on Russia, raised the alarm about the threat from China and helped secure the release of Britons held in Iran.

She is passionate about economic issues, and colleagues say it was at the Treasury that her ambitions and image really took off.

Sonia Khan was special adviser to Philip Hammond, the chancellor, when Ms Truss was appointed chief secretary to the Treasury in 2017 - having been demoted by Theresa May after a difficult spell as justice secretary.

"I think the Treasury was the making of Liz, it was where she gained so much confidence after losing her justice job," she said. "She came into her own and revitalised her image. You saw the floral outfits disappear and you saw her wear power suits, and really bold colours, which I think reflected a newfound confidence.

"It's where she discovered social media. She'd found a space to cultivate who she is. She's funny, she's quite good with puns, she's got an eye for making sure a picture looks good.

Ms Khan says her status as "queen of Instagram" boosted her profile within the cabinet. "It was very clear that she had this very, very keen political eye for the policies that she wanted to own and promote on social media."

On taking the Treasury job, she tweeted: "I aim to be to the disruptor-in-chief", saying she wanted to cut red tape and empowering families and businesses.

As prime minister, she's promised radical measures to tackle the cost-of-living squeeze within a week of taking office. Allies say she has the inner steel to drive them through.

But inheriting a grim outlook, and a party deeply divided by this contest, she won't have long to win over some of her colleagues and the public.

Related Topics

• United Kingdom

What To Know About Liz Truss, Britain’s New Prime Minister

N early two months after Boris Johnson reluctantly announced his resignation on the steps of 10 Downing Street, Britain has finally chosen a new leader: Liz Truss.

“It’s an honour to be elected as leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party. I’d like to thank the 1922 Committee, the party chairman of the Conservative Party, for organizing one of the longest job interviews in history,” Truss joked , after the results were announced on Monday. “I’d also like to thank my family, my friends, my political colleagues, and all of those who helped on this campaign. I’m incredibly grateful for all of your support.”

Truss’s victory over her leadership rival, the former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, had been widely regarded as a foregone conclusion in Westminster. She quickly emerged the runaway favorite among the Conservative Party’s card-carrying members (second only to her erstwhile boss ). Despite the U.K.’s soon-to-be third female leader’s efforts to promote herself as the ideological reincarnate of its first, Margaret Thatcher, Truss is perhaps most aptly seen as the continuity Johnson candidate. And perhaps just as well: After she is formally appointed Prime Minister by the Queen on Sept. 6, Truss’s first order of business will be to tackle the many crises that her predecessor left behind.

Here’s what to know about her.

Who is Liz Truss?

Known for being a political chameleon, Truss has worn several ideological hats over the course of her life. Born in Oxford to a left-wing family, Truss’s childhood often involved joining her mother on demonstrations in favor of nuclear disarmament and against Thatcher’s Conservative government, which ushered in sweeping economic reforms centered around free markets, privatization, and a small state. As a student at Oxford University, she led the centrist Liberal Democrats’ student society and advocated for the abolition of the monarchy . She later switched her allegiance to the Conservative Party—a transition she attributed to maturity. (“We all had teenage misadventures,” Truss told Conservative voters on the campaign trail. “Some people had sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. I had the Liberal Democrats.”)

Revelations that Truss had an affair in the early 2000s with a Conservative lawmaker 10 years her senior threatened to derail her parliamentary ambitions. But she was elected an MP in 2010 and rose through the Tory ranks. In 2014, Truss became the country’s youngest female cabinet minister as environmental secretary in David Cameron’s government and ultimately went on to serve in the cabinets of Theresa May and Johnson.

During the 2016 Brexit referendum, just six years into her tenure as a Conservative lawmaker, Truss became a vocal proponent for the U.K. to stay in the E.U., calling Brexit a “ triple tragedy ” advocated by those “living in cloud cuckoo land.”

Six years on, Truss is an arch-Brexiteer and a standard-bearer of the country’s Euroskeptic, Thatcherite right-wing—a position that made her the natural darling of the Conservative Party faithful. She describes herself as “ relentless ,” which could help explain her rapid rise through the Conservative ranks. She is also seen as fiercely loyal, having been one of the few ministers not to resign during the fall of Johnson’s scandal-plagued premiership. To her critics, however, she is a political opportunist—someone who can tack rapidly and completely to whatever position suits her at the time.

Read More: Why U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson Resigned

How does she compare to Boris Johnson?

From everything Truss has said on the campaign trail, it is clear that she is “broadly continuity Johnson,” says Gavin Barwell, a former Conservative minister and chief of staff to ex-Prime Minister Theresa May. On matters of foreign policy, Truss is in lockstep with her predecessor, especially when it comes to support for Ukraine. On economic policy, however, Truss advocates for tax cuts and offers a perhaps far more divergent view in some areas—particularly when it comes to social spending, where Johnson had bucked his party’s views on limited government.

Like Johnson, Truss is known for having a bit of a goofy public persona—one that is best illustrated by her viral speech on British pork markets. What remains to be seen, however, is whether she will be able to match Johnson’s popularity, especially among the Tory grassroots. “Very few people could match Boris Johson’s charismatic appeal,” says Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University in London and the head of a research project focusing on the membership of the U.K.’s main political parties. “Liz Truss certainly can’t.”

Perhaps the important commonality will be whether Truss chooses to continue the Johnsonian legacy of undermining British political norms and conventions. Like Johnson, Truss has indicated that she may not appoint a new ethics adviser, a role that is responsible for advising the Prime Minister on ethics in public life. The last two advisers quit over the Johnson government’s failure to adhere to the ministerial code of conduct. But the way Truss sees it, her government won’t be needing such monitoring. “I am somebody who has always acted with integrity,” she said on the campaign trail, “and that is what I would do as Prime Minister.”

What do other world leaders make of her?

As Foreign Secretary, Truss has had plenty of face time with world leaders. But she is bound to face major challenges, especially over her relationship with the U.K.’s European allies. Relations between the U.K. and the E.U. soured earlier this year after Truss introduced legislation that threatens to unilaterally undermine the delicate post-Brexit trading arrangements on the island of Ireland—which is separated by Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, which is an E.U. member state. As a candidate, Truss pledged to deliver on legislation that will unilaterally scrap checks on goods going between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., despite concerns that it could breach international law.

Truss drew further criticism on the campaign trail for saying that “ the jury’s out ” on whether French President Emmanuel Macron is a friend or foe of the U.K. (Macron, in a seemingly exasperated response , reaffirmed that the U.K. is a friendly nation, “regardless, and sometimes in spite of, its leaders.”)

“That reflected her real gut feeling about dealing with the Europeans,” says Peter Ricketts, a former British diplomat who served as the U.K.’s ambassador to France. “I think we’re headed into even rougher waters with the Europeans, even than under Johnson.”

Another important relationship to watch will be with the White House. Truss has reportedly expressed less enthusiasm for the so-called “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K. than past prime ministers. Although she will undoubtedly continue the close cooperation between London and Washington, especially when it comes to shared policy on Russia and China, there is bound to be friction with the Biden Administration over her plans to proceed with rewriting the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Read More: Boris Johnson Shattered Britain’s Political Norms. Ultimately, That Was His Undoing

What is she up against?

At this point, it would be easier to list what she isn’t up against. Truss’s intray is filled with numerous crises left over from the Johnson era, the most daunting of which is the country’s cost-of-living crisis. Britons are facing a winter in which their household energy bills could rise by an eye-watering 80%; in July inflation hit a 40-year high of 10.1% . Truss has pledged to make passing an emergency budget one of her first orders of business, though she has been tight-lipped about exactly what her package of support will entail.

In addition to the U.K.’s economic challenges, Truss will also have to contend with looming political crises, and not just in Northern Ireland. Over in Scotland, the Scottish Nationalist Party will be awaiting next month’s U.K. Supreme Court hearing on whether the devolved Scottish government can hold an independence referendum without the consent of Westminster—the outcome of which could renew focus on the fate of the British Union and Truss’s ability to preserve it. Support for Scottish independence has surged in the years following Brexit—Scotland had voted heavily in favor of Remain—reaching a high of 55% last year. As far as the SNP lawmaker Stewart McDonald is concerned, Truss’s government “will still be voter repellent to most people in Scotland,” just as Johnson’s was.

Beyond these crises, Truss has also to attend to the small matter of uniting her party after a bruising leadership campaign. While this may not be too much of a challenge when it comes to making peace with her formal leadership rivals, several of whom are being tipped for plum jobs in her cabinet, it could prove more difficult if her predecessor chooses to play an outsized role in affairs. Like other ex-PMs, Johnson will be reprising his role in parliament as a rank-and-file MP. But Johnson’s biggest challenge to Truss might not be from the backbenches. “I suspect he’ll go back to writing a regular newspaper column, and that will always be newsworthy given the kind of person he is,” says Barwell. “And that’s going to be really challenging for the Prime Minister.”

Will Truss last?

The U.K.’s next general election isn’t due to take place until late 2024 or January 2025. Truss could technically call for a snap election before then, though it would be highly unusual given the Conservative Party’s large majority in parliament and the opposition Labour Party’s significant lead in the polls. But that doesn’t mean that Truss is guaranteed to last through to the next election—the Tories have a habit of booting leaders out. “She could prove to be the last in this line of Conservative prime ministers,” says Ricketts. “She’s the fourth in six years. That’s a pretty fast turnover for British politics.”

More Must-Reads From TIME

• The 100 Most Influential People of 2024
• The Revolution of Yulia Navalnaya
• 6 Compliments That Land Every Time
• What's the Deal With the Bitcoin Halving?
• If You're Dating Right Now , You're Brave: Column
• The AI That Could Heal a Divided Internet
• Fallout Is a Brilliant Model for the Future of Video Game Adaptations
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Write to Yasmeen Serhan/London at [email protected]

Here's what you need to know about Liz Truss, Britain's new leader

LONDON — As a girl and a young woman, Liz Truss protested against then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and called for the abolition of the monarchy. 

Decades later, having risen through the ranks of Thatcher’s Conservative Party, Truss, 47, on Tuesday was appointed the United Kingdom's prime minister by Queen Elizabeth II . 

As she heads to No. 10 Downing St., Truss looks eager to rule in the image of the famously blunt and strong-willed iconoclast — whose legacy still divides this country. Her victory means she will become the country’s third female leader, after Thatcher and Theresa May .

The “Iron Lady,” as Thatcher was known, was the 20th century’s longest serving British leader and birthed an ideology — Thatcherism — that still dominates the party with its low-tax, high-growth economic liberalism.

Serving as premier from 1979 to 1990, when she was forced to resign by her own government, Thatcher was a strident cold warrior and a supporter of free markets, and especially close to President Ronald Reagan . One of Britain’s most divisive prime ministers — reviled and revered in almost equal measure to this day — she is best known for her policies on deregulation, privatizing state-owned companies and smashing the power of unions. She died in 2013.

Whether intentional or not, observers and the public have pointed out, Truss appears to have a habit of re-creating iconic Thatcher public appearances. 

While serving as foreign secretary, Truss was accused of consciously mirroring Thatcher by posing in a Challenger 2 tank while visiting British troops in Estonia — reminiscent of a famous picture of Thatcher in a Challenger tank in Germany in 1986. 

When visiting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Kremlin in February, she wore a faux fur hat that again was compared to that worn by Thatcher on a Russia trip in 1987.

During the Conservative leadership contest, Truss wore an outfit strikingly similar to one Thatcher had worn for an election broadcast in 1979 — a black blazer and a white shirt with a bow tied at the front.

For Truss’ critics, the similarities to Thatcher are at best premature and at worst ludicrous. 

“I don’t think there’s anything in it. They’re completely different people,” Truss supporter Andrea Andino, 52, insisted outside the venue where Truss was announced the new leader of the Conservative Party on Monday. Andino wore a T-shirt “In Liz We Truss”. 

“She is different. I don’t think she will follow Thatcher in any way,” she added.

Timothy Kirkhope, a Conservative member of the upper chamber of the British Parliament, also dismissed the comparison -- but for different reasons.

“I regard any comparison between Truss and Thatcher as derisory!” he said in an email.

“I worked as a government whip under Margaret Thatcher. She was a colossus in politics. There is absolutely no way that Truss could ever get anywhere near the achievements of Thatcher,” he said.

Truss herself complained to BBC Radio 4 in July that women tend to get compared to Thatcher whether they resemble her or not. 

“I am my own person,” she said.

James Cleverly, who served as education minister under Boris Johnson, echoes these sentiments. 

“She’s a woman in politics, those comparisons are inevitable.” he said  “She is Liz Truss, she is her own person.”

“To those of us who’ve studied Thatcher, she’s hardly in the same league, at least on current form,” said professor Tim Bale, an expert on British politics and the Conservative Party at Queen Mary University of London. 

While Thatcher was regarded then and now as a conviction politician who embodied her beliefs, Truss has been accused of being a political chameleon, flip-flopping on major policies and criticized for lacking hard-and-fast principles. 

She was an activist for the centrist Liberal Democrat Party as a college student. 

“We do not believe people are born to rule,” she said while arguing passionately for the abolition of the monarchy at the party’s conference in 1994 — a testament to just how far she has traveled politically.

Truss campaigned for Britain to remain in the European Union only to flip sides and later support Brexit once the country had voted to leave in 2016. Commitment to Brexit and unlocking its supposed benefits is now a core pillar of her platform — an attitude that could lead to a heated and expensive legal battle with the European Union and the Republic of Ireland over the complex Northern Ireland protocol .

While Truss said during the Brexit referendum campaign that Britain shouldn’t “spend years in a messy divorce from Europe,” she may be about to preside over exactly this.

Born in Oxford in 1975, Mary Elizabeth Truss is the daughter of John Kenneth, a math professor at the University of Leeds, and Priscilla Truss, a nurse. In the biography section of her website, she describes her parents as “left wing.”

When she was 4, the family relocated to Paisley, a town near Glasgow in Scotland. They moved again in 1985 to the northern English city of Leeds, in West Yorkshire. 

Truss frequently refers to herself as a “Yorkshirewoman,” a folksy attempt to contrast her upbringing with the largely affluent, southern English background of many Conservative members and activists. 

Throughout her leadership campaign, Truss said her vision of conservatism was inspired by seeing fellow students at the local public high school struggling in an overly bureaucratic, failing system. 

“Many of the children I was at school with were let down by low expectations, poor educational standards and a lack of opportunity,” she said at her leadership launch July 14.

Former students and staff at Roundhay and also local politicians disputed Truss’ portrayal, accusing her of unfairly maligning the school for political gain. 

Kirkhope was the Conservative MP for Leeds North East when Truss attended Roundhay.

“It is located in one of the most affluent areas of Leeds and it certainly could never be described fairly as a ‘sink school,’’’ he said via email, referring to British terminology for a failing and underachieving school.

Kirkhope also highlights the fact that after graduating from Roundhay, Truss gained entry into one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the world, the University of Oxford . There she studied philosophy, politics and economics, a traditional first step for many who want to enter British politics.

“Her contentions about her ‘deprived’ background, as the daughter of a university professor are a load of nonsense” Kirkhope said.

After graduating from Oxford in 1996, she abandoned the Liberal Democrats and joined the Conservative Party, to the dismay of her left-leaning father. “He was quite horrified,” she told The Times newspaper in 2012.

After college, Truss worked as a graduate trainee accountant for the energy giant Shell and later the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless. In 2000, she married fellow accountant Hugh O’Leary and they have two daughters.

After a youth on the center-left, university primed Truss for a conversion to the right. 

“I met Tories and I realized that they didn’t have two heads and were actually good people,” she told the Daily Mail in 2019. 

Truss stood as a Tory candidate in the elections of 2001 and 2005, losing both times. It would take another five years before she was finally elected as the MP for South West Norfolk. 

Truss has served in various Cabinet positions since 2012, under the governments of David Cameron , Theresa May and Johnson . It was under Johnson that she was promoted to foreign minister, one of the most powerful positions in government — tasked with leading the transition to a post-Brexit trading regime and forging new diplomatic ties.

The Conservative Party may have ditched Johnson, but his brand of populism looks set to stay under the new prime minister. 

“She stayed loyal to Johnson. She’s told the membership what they want to hear on the economy and taxation rather than any hard truths. She’s a fierce Brexiteer and an ‘anti-woke’ warrior,” Bale said.

Truss may be compared to Thatcher, but her critics believe she has much more in common with her predecessor. 

“I regret that a Liz Truss premiership would be a continuation of the Boris Johnson style,” Kirkhope said.

A Truss government would be “even more divisive” and include “individuals who are notable only for their extreme or eccentric views,” he said.

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

Who is Liz Truss, the U.K.’s new prime minister?

LONDON — The new prime minister of Britain is Liz Truss, whose political journey began on the left — down with the monarchy! she cried — only to arrive on the right, as a hard-line Brexiteer who has tried to channel the Iron Lady herself, Margaret Thatcher.

Truss has held six ministerial posts under three prime ministers, including 11 months as foreign minister. Yet after her years of public service and a summer making her pitch to Conservative Party activists, many Britons confess they don’t really know Truss. Not the way they knew Boris Johnson — former London mayor, newspaper columnist, colorful orator, serial prevaricator — when he took office just a few years ago.

It’s fair to say Truss is a shapeshifter . She fought for Britain to remain in the European Union before becoming a staunch defender of Brexit. Her supporters say she accepted the outcome of the 2016 referendum and got with the program. Others say she’s a weather vane, pivoting when it suits her advancement.

Liz Truss to replace Boris Johnson as next U.K. prime minister

She’s been called “ambitious” by her critics. Truss responds that’s what they always call women who rise.

Unpopular in Moscow — and Brussels

Truss is a reliable NATO ally and Ukraine supporter, talking tough on Russia and Vladimir Putin. She’s led the charge on sanctioning oligarchs — many who had been living the high life in London.

But she has stumbled. In a BBC interview at the start of the war, she endorsed, “absolutely,” the idea of Britons going to fight in Ukraine — a remark that the British defense establishment vehemently shot down.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov argued that Truss was a prime example of how the West didn’t understand the basic geography of the conflict, after the British foreign secretary appeared confused in a February closed-door meeting about whether two territories — Rostov and Voronezh — were in Russia or Ukraine. British officials said that Truss had misheard Lavrov and that the alleged gaffe was Russian propaganda designed to distract from its aggressions.

While unpopular in Moscow, Truss is also not big in Brussels. She’s seen as an agitator, an anti-Europe opportunist who could make matters even worse in the rocky relationship between Britain and the 27-nation bloc.

“The jury is still out,” Truss said last week, on whether French President Emmanuel Macron was “friend or foe” — a remarkable diss for one the U.K.’s closest trading partners.

Macron responded, “If the French and British are not capable of saying whether we are friends or enemies — the term is not neutral — we are going to have a problem.”

When she became foreign minister a year ago, there was hope in Europe that she might prove a fair partner, said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at the Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm.

Instead, she pushed forward plans for a unilateral rewriting of a key part of the post-Brexit agreement, the Northern Ireland Protocol, outraging European officials.

Brexit is Boris Johnson’s singular achievement. How well is it working?

“The E.U. feels quite burned by Truss,” Rahman said. “She brings a massive trust deficit to the relationship from day one.”

In Washington, at least outside of diplomatic circles, there’s not much of an official take on Truss. She wants a trade deal with the United States — which the Biden administration is in no rush to negotiate. The White House is also wary of her moves on Northern Ireland.

Winning over Tories with tax cuts

The 47-year-old Truss promises to slash taxes and boost borrowing, even as inflation soars past 10 percent and the Bank of England forecasts a protracted recession by year’s end — alongside an energy price spike set to quadruple the heating bills for homeowners and businesses.

Boris Johnson idolized Churchill. U.K.’s next leader may look to Thatcher.

No matter. This was not a general election but a selection by 172,437 Conservative Party members — about 0.3 percent of the British population — who are older, wealthier and 95 percent White and more to the right than Britain as a whole.

They were the ones choosing between finalists Truss and Rishi Sunak , whose resignation as chancellor of the Exchequer, or finance secretary, helped launch the revolt against Johnson.

It’s Rishi Sunak vs. Liz Truss for U.K. leader; Boris Johnson says, ‘Hasta la vista, baby!’

Truss’s brother Francis told BBC in 2017 that his older sister was always confident and opinionated, and hated losing, even at Monopoly.

“She was someone who had to win. She would create some special system to work out how to win,” Francis said.

She has, once again, figured out a path to victory.

“She’s said the kind of things that Conservative Party members like to hear,” said Jonathan Tonge, a politics expert at the University of Liverpool.

Namely, she’s promised to lower taxes — “that’s like throwing red meat at Tory members,” Tonge said — whereas her opponent, Sunak, said the country first needs to tame inflation.

It also helped Truss that, unlike her rival, she stayed loyal to Johnson, who remains popular with the grass roots, who already confess they miss him . If Johnson had been on the ballot, he would have had a good chance of winning.

Conservative leadership race is making some Tories miss Boris Johnson

From liberal to conservative, with many strong beliefs along the way

Another point in Truss’s favor: Compared with Sunak, she has more humble origins.

Truss alluded to Sunak’s pricey private education — a sensitive topic in class-conscious Britain — in contrast to her state high school in Leeds, where children were “let down,” she said, with “low expectations, poor educational standards and lack of opportunity.”

It was this experience that she said eventually led her to move right. “It’s the reason I am a Conservative,” she said.

She describes her parents as “left-wing activists,” her father a professor of pure mathematics at the University of Leeds and mother a nurse and local leader of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Several former teachers and students have disputed her description of her high school.

Dave Hendry, who was a year behind Truss at Roundhay School, told The Washington Post that he doesn’t recognize her account. “I had the complete opposite experience, with teachers there for me, helping me,” said Hendry, who still lives in the affluent area in northeast Leeds.

He said he’d love for his three young children to get into Roundhay. “If it’s that bad, how come they gave her extra tutoring to get into Oxford? I think she’s just trying to score political points.”

After high school, Truss studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University — like many prime ministers in the making before her.

She was president of the center-left Oxford University Liberal Democrats, and it was at a Lib Dem conference in Brighton in 1994 that she called for abolishing the monarchy. “We do not believe people are born to rule,” she told delegates.

She has since described the royal family as “essential” to Britain.

Neil Fawcett, now a Liberal Democrat councilor, worked with Truss during that time.

He told The Post: “She’s one of the most difficult people I’ve ever worked with. She’s extremely strong-minded and takes fixed positions and won’t be moved from them, even if there’s clear evidence that what she wants won’t work.” He added that it was also “very difficult to tell what she actually believed. She took strong positions to play to whatever audience she was speaking to.”

Marc Stears, Truss’s tutor at Oxford and now director of a policy lab at University College London, offered a similar account in the Times of London. He wrote that in their tutorials, Truss “demonstrated an unnerving ability to surprise” and was “self-consciously unconventional.”

“Truss lacks the media élan of Tony Blair and David Cameron. She lacks the dogged determination of Gordon Brown or the patient, long-term vision of Margaret Thatcher,” he wrote. “Her most noticeable characteristic is a capacity to shift, unblinkingly, from one fiercely held belief to another.”

Truss explains her political positions before joining the Conservative Party in 1996 as youthful indiscretions.

She told the BBC, “When I was in my youth, I was a professional controversialist and I liked exploring ideas and stirring things up.”

Speaking to an audience of Tories last month, she said: “People may know about me that I have a bit of a dubious past … We all make mistakes, we all had teenage misadventures, and that was mine. Some people have sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, I was in the Liberal Democrats. I’m sorry.”

She uses the line often — and it always gets applause from her party members.

What sort of prime minister would she be?

In recent years, British politics could be described, judiciously, as a little crazy. Brexit, lockdown parties, scandal. Three prime ministers in six years. David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson. Gone, gone, gone. Each one done in by their party. Or as some Conservative Party members themselves describe it: “Tory psychodrama.”

Will Truss steady the ship? The assessments are mixed.

Ben Wallace, Britain's defense secretary, said he was backing Truss “not because she is a slick salesperson, but because she is authentic.”

Wallace said, “She stands her ground. She is straight and means what she says.”

Dominic Cummings , Johnson’s former chief adviser, who helped bring down his former boss, has called Truss “a compulsive leaker” and “a mad box of snakes” and “a human hand grenade.”

Cummings told UnHerd , a center-right online outlet, that Truss would be an “even worse” prime minister than Johnson.

Her standing on the continent is such that Politico Europe, a Brussels must-read, recently ran a piece headlined, “ Does the whole world hate Liz Truss ?”

Probably not. Most of the whole hasn’t even heard of Liz Truss. But they soon will be able see where she wants to take the country.

Rauhala reported from Brussels.

Liz Truss Wiki, Age, Husband, Children, Family, Biography & More

Liz Truss is a British politician who has served the UK government at various key positions under prime ministers David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson including Minister for Women and Equalities, and Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs. She was the Conservative candidate for the 2022 elections for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In September 2022, she became the 56th Prime Minister and the 3rd woman Prime Minister of the UK. On 20 October 2022, she announced her resignation as Prime Minister.

Wiki/Biography

Mary Elizabeth Truss [1] The Hindu was born on Saturday, 26 July 1975 ( age 47 years; as of 2022 ) in Oxford, United Kingdom. Her zodiac sign is Leo. When she was four, her parents left England and moved to Scotland. Liz went to West Primary School in Paisley, Renfrewshire in Scotland. [2] The Scotsman Later, she attended Roundhay School in the Roundhay area of Leeds, England. [3] The Guardian She left for Canada and studied at Parkcrest School for a year, from 1987 to 1988.

A group photo of Liz with students of Grade 6 & 7 of Parkcrest School, Canada (1987-1988)

She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Merton College affiliated with Oxford University in England. She was interested in Liberal Democrats and was chosen as the president of Oxford University Liberal Democrats and became a member of the National Executive Committee of Liberal Democrat Youth and Students. In 1994, she gave a speech at Liberal Democrat Federal Conference. After becoming a Liberal Democrat, she supported the legality of cannabis and the abolition of the monarchy. She expressed her Republican beliefs and said,

I agree with Paddy Ashdown when he said, ‘Everybody in Britain should have the chance to be a somebody,’ but only one family can provide the head of state… we believe in referenda on major constitutional issues; we do not believe people should be born to rule, or that they should put up and shut up about decisions which affect their everyday lives.”

She graduated from Merton College in 1996, and in the same year, she joined the Conservative Party.

A childhood photo of Liz at the age of 12

Physical Appearance

Height (approx.):  5′ 6″

Weight (approx.): 60 kg

Hair Color: Extra light beige blonde

Eye Colour: Blue

Liz belongs to a Christian family in England. [4] Christian Concern

Parents & Siblings

Her father, John Kenneth Truss, is a professor of pure mathematics at the University of Leeds. Her mother, Priscilla Mary Truss, is a nurse, teacher, and member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She has three younger brothers.

A childhood photo of Liz with her parents

Liz Truss with her mother, Priscilla Truss

Husband & Children

In 2000, Liz got married to her fellow accountant Hugh O’Leary , who is a finance director. She met him for the first time at the Conservative Party Conference in 1997. They have two daughters named Liberty and Frances . [5] Metro

Liz with her husband, Hugh O’Leary

Liz Truss with her daughters, Frances and Liberty

Relationships/Affairs

Reportedly, Liz Truss had an affair with former Tory MP Mark Field. They started dating each other in 2004, which came to an end in June 2005 after dating each other for 18 months. When the news of their relationship became public, Mark Field’s 12-year-long marriage ended in divorce; however, Liz managed to save her marriage. [6] Express

Former Tory MP Mark Field

Signature of Liz Truss

Corporate Sector

Liz worked for a British oil and gas company, Shell, from 1996 to 2000. In 1999, while working for Shell, she qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant (ACMA). In 2000, she started working for a British telecommunications company, Cable & Wireless. She was promoted to the position of economic director before she left the company in 2005. In January 2008, she was appointed as the full-time deputy director of Reform,  a think tank that carries out various research papers related to government policies. While working at Reform, she became the co-author of multiple reports including The Value of Mathematics and A New Level.

In 1998, Liz was appointed as the chairperson of the Lewisham Deptford Conservative Association and held the position for 2 years. She participated in the 1998 Greenwich London Borough Council elections from Vanbrugh Ward and Greenwich Council elections from Blackheath Westcombe in 2002; however, she lost both elections. In 2006, she was appointed as the councillor for Eltham South in Greenwich, but before the end of her term in 2010, she resigned from the position.

Candidate for Parliament Elections

In 2001, Liz contested the Labour-held constituency of Hemsworth in West Yorkshire. Before the 2005 UK general elections, Liz was selected to stand in the elections after replacing the parliamentary candidate for Calder Valley, Sue Catling. She was listed in the Priority List of Conservative members of Parliament under David Cameron, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She was selected for the South West Norfolk seat by members of the constituency Conservative Association in October 2009; she won half of the votes in the first round of elections. Later, after the revelation of Liz’s affair with Conservative MP Mark Field, some members of the constituency association opposed Truss’ selection. At a general meeting of the association’s members held three weeks later, a resolution to cancel Truss’ candidacy was put forth, but it was defeated by 132 votes to 37.

Parliament Member

Dualling of a11 trunk road.

Prior to the elections to the House of Commons on 6 May 2010, she fought for the issues including the retention of the RAF Tornado base at RAF Marham in her constituency. In 2011, she succeeded in persuading the government for converting A11, a major trunk road in England, into a dual carriageway. She said,

My constituents were delighted to hear in the autumn Comprehensive Spending Review that the final stretch of the A11 was to be dualled. This will have a magnificent impact on economic growth in the county and local businesses. Yet we are still to hear exactly when this major work will take place.” [7] Eastern Daily Press

Protecting Thetford Forest

In 2011, she played a crucial role in protecting Thetford Forest from any sell-off of Forestry Commission land by designating it as a Heritage Forest. She, along with other parliamentarians and council leaders, urged Defra secretary of State, Caroline Spelman, to award the Heritage Forest status to Thetford Forest. Regarding this issue, Liz said,

I highlighted to the secretary of state that I had received a considerable amount of correspondence from constituents who are extremely concerned that the status of the forest will change. I pressed upon the Secretary of State that Thetford Forest deserves Heritage status to preserve the biodiversity and community access. The Secretary of State did say said that this is a public consultation and that the public’s views will be taken into account. I would therefore urge those who are concerned about Thetford Forest to write to DEFRA whilst this consultation is ongoing. I will continue to keep pressing the case to ensure the Secretary of State understands the views of my constituents to safeguard Thetford Forest as a Heritage Forest.” [8] Eastern Daily Press

Wrote a Paper for EPI

In march 2011, she wrote a paper for an education policy think tank, Education Policy Institute (EPI), in which she mentioned how low-income students were being kept out of top jobs, and how to improve social mobility. In 2012, she wrote again for EPI about the changes that should be made in the structure of the childcare market in Britain.

Liz Truss at the 2013 think tank Policy Exchange

Free Enterprise Group

In 2011, she founded a group along with the support of over 40 other Conservative MPs named the Free Enterprise Group. In the same year, she co-wrote the book “After the Coalition” with the help of four other members of the group. The book is about the Conservative principles adapted to the modern world that are essential for national success.

Cover of the book ‘After The Coalition’ co-written by Liz Truss

In 2012, the same 5 authors published another book titled “Britannia Unchained,” which contained the declaration that

Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world.”

She published a paper in 2012 to make a policy to allow people to have tax-free and less-heavily regulated marginal employment. In 2011, she became a member of the Justice Select Committee.

Preventing Waste Incineration Construction at King’s Lynn

In 2013, the building of a waste incinerator at King’s Lynn was approved by the Conservative administration at Norfolk County Council, but Liz did not support it, and successfully managed the government to withdraw its grant to the county council. [9] BBC News In the same year, after seeing the concerns raised by Walsoken Parish Council about a large number of crashes that occurred at the Road junction of the A47, causing several deaths and serious injuries, as the MP of South West Norfolk, Liz began the campaign after visiting the junction herself, and she heavily campaigned to address the issue of road safety following which she received an assurance from the Department for Transport that safety improvements would be made. Due to her efforts to stop fatal accidents on the A47, South West Norfolk MP Liz was selected as Road Safety Parliamentarian of the Month by a road safety charity named Brake in January 2013. In an interview, while talking about this, Liz said,

The campaign to see improvements on the A47 is still ongoing and is a combined effort of MPs, local residents and councils. I thank Brake for the award and I will continue to lobby the Department for Transport to ensure that the A47 is fit for purpose.”

Junior Minister (2012-2014)

Liz became the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Education on 4 September 2012. She was held responsible for childcare and early learning, assessment, qualifications and curriculum reform, behaviour and attendance, and school food review. After observing that British pupils were way behind in mathematics than those in Asian countries, she decided to enhance British standards in maths. In 2014, she went to Shanghai, China to visit the schools and teacher-training centres to observe how local children have developed into the world’s top mathematicians. In order to increase the number of children compared to adults in a care facility and to overhaul childcare qualifications, Truss also described plans for reforming childcare in England. These changes were made to increase staff pay and qualifications and to expand the availability of childcare. Organisations like the charity 4Children, the Confederation of British Industry, and the College of West Angelia appreciated the reforms proposed by Liz; however, TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady, Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg, and the charity National Day Nurseries Association criticised the reform.

Environment Secretary (2014-2016)

On 15 July 2014, Liz was appointed as the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in a cabinet reshuffle. In the same year, she came up with a plan to save traditional meadows, which consisted of the most fertile land for pollinators, by launching a 10-year bee and pollinator strategy to save the decreasing bee populations. She authorised the restricted temporary suspension of an EU restriction in July 2015, allowing the use of two neonicotinoid pesticides on 5% of England’s oilseed rape crop for 120 days to combat the cabbage stem flea beetle; in 2012, campaigners informed that pesticides were harming bees by destroying their ability to find their home. In 2014, Liz confirmed to cut a taxpayer subsidy to farmers and land owners for solar panels on agricultural land. Regarding this scheme, Liz said,

I want Britain to lead the world in food and farming and to do that we need enough productive agricultural land.” [10] BBC News

According to Liz, farming and food are “hotbeds of innovation.” Production and export of cheese, pork pies, apples, and more food items were promoted by her. In 2015, she was one of the two cabinet ministers, who voted against the government’s proposal for cigarettes to be sold in plain packaging.

Justice Secretary (2016-2017)

In July 2016, Liz began to serve as Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor in the first ministry of Theresa May; she was reported to be the first woman to hold the office since the creation of the office. In November 2016, former Attorney General Dominic Grieve and the Criminal Bar Association criticised her for not supporting the judiciary successfully and the principle of judicial independence when three judges of the Divisional Court were criticised by many politicians and the Daily Mail for ruling against the government in R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the Europen Union. Former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer criticised her by saying that she did not possess the essential legal expertise that the constitution required. However, she defended herself by saying that the judiciary was enough robust to handle the attacks of The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. She refused that she had failed to defend the judges and said,

An independent judiciary is the cornerstone of the rule of law, vital to our constitution and freedoms. It is my duty as Lord Chancellor to defend that independence. I swore to do so under my oath of office. I take that very seriously and I will always do so. [11] The Guardian

In 2015 and 2016, prison violence incidents increased in prisons in England and Wales, which made Liz invest £1.3 billion in the prison service programme in November 2016 and hire 2,500 extra prison officers for strengthening the security.

Liz as justice secretary at the Lord Mayor of London’s banquet in 2016

Chief Secretary to the Treasury (2017-2019)

On 11 June 2017, Liz became the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, which was considered a demotion by others. Reportedly, while serving as the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, she developed an interest in making her online presence on Twitter and Instagram. A British daily newspaper termed her presence on social media as an orthodox trick to increase her fan following. Her tenure was referred to as Chief Secretary “exhausting” due to her challenging work schedule and regularly asking officials multiple questions. In June 2018, she gave a speech in which she alerted that raising taxes could see the Tories being “crushed” at the polls. In 2019, she revealed that she could be a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party after Theresa May. However, she chose not to stand and decided to support Boris Johnson.

International Trade Secretary (2019-2021)

After Boris Johnson became the Prime Minister, Liz was expected to advance in her position as a result of her support for Johnson’s leadership campaign during which she provided economic policy advice and helped design initiatives to lower taxes for those making over £50,000. Therefore, she was supposed to be appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer or Business Secretary, but she was promoted to the position of Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade in 2019.

Liz giving a speech at the British Chambers of Commerce at a BBC conference in March 2019

She was appointed as the Minister for Women and Equalities after the resignation of Amber Rudd. In 2019, Liz was spotted saying that the Department for International Trade “accidentally” allowed shipping of £435,000 of radio spares and £200 air coolers to Saudi Arabia, violating an order of the Court of Appeal, twice. It was later found out that the arms sold to Saudi Arabia by the UK, that were used in the war in Yemen, were illegal. [12] BBC News Even after Liz’s apology to a Commons committee on arms export controls, opposition MPs were not satisfied with the apology for breaking the law and wanted her to resign from her position. In March 2020, she presented the Trade Act 2021 to the Parliament, which settled a legal framework for the UK for doing business with countries around the world. [13] The Telegraph On 7 July 2020, Liz removed the ban on the export of arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia after one year. She said,

There is not a clear risk that the export of arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia might be used in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law.” [14] Defense News

In August 2020, Liz took the responsibility to negotiate a post-Brexit free trade agreement between England and Japan. In September 2020, both countries signed the agreement. According to Liz, the agreement would make 99% of exports to Japan tariff-free. The agreement was considered a historic moment as it was the first major business deal signed by the UK after leaving the European Union. In December 2020, in a speech on equality policy, Truss claimed that the UK placed too much emphasis on “fashionable” racial, sexual, and gender concerns at the expense of poverty and regional inequality. It also criticised Paul-Michel Foucault and postmodernist philosophy. She declared in her address that unconscious bias training will no longer be used by the government or civil service.

UK Secretary of State for International Trade Liz Truss with former National Security Advisor of the United States in 2019

Foreign Secretary (2021-present)

On 15 September 2021, Liz was promoted to the position of Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Affairs. After Margaret Beckett, Liz was the second woman to be appointed for this position. In October 2021, she called Russia to step in the Belarus-European Union order crisis, a migrant crisis after the arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants, especially from Iraq, Asia, and some parts of Africa and put forth her wish to have a closer economic and investment relationship with the Gulf Cooperation Council, which Saudi Arabia and Qatar are members of. In November 2021, Liz declared a 10-year-long deal along with the former Foreign Affairs Minister of Israel Yair Lapid with the goal to stop Iran from making nuclear weapons. She had a meeting with the Foreign Affairs Minister of Russia Sergey Lavrov in Stockholm in December 2021, urging Russia to draw back from the conflict in Ukraine. In December 2021, after the resignation of Lord Frost, Liz held the position of the government’s chief negotiator with the European Union. On 30 January 2022, she appeared on BBC’s Sunday Morning programme in which she said,

We are supplying and offering extra support into our Baltic allies across the Black Sea, as well as supplying the Ukrainians with defensive weapons.” [15] The Herald

She was mocked for this statement as Baltic states are situated on or near the Baltic sea and not the Black sea, which is at a distance of 700 miles from the Baltic.

British Foreign Minister, Liz Truss with Indian Foreign Minister, Dr S Jaishankar on her visit to India in 2021

Conservative Party Leadership Election in 2022

On 10 July 2022, Liz declared to take part in the Conservative Party leadership elections and replace Boris Johnson to become the next prime Minister of England. She promised to cut taxes from the first day if chosen and help people who were facing problems with the cost of living by taking immediate action. As part of a “long-term plan to reduce the size of the state and the tax burden,” she declared that she would cancel a planned increase in Corporation Tax and reverse the recent increase in National Insurance Rates. After Boris Johnson had to resign from the position of Prime Minister of the UK, Liz Truss became the frontrunner along with former finance minister Rishi Sunak to become the Prime Minister of England. Both the candidates got into several debates opposing each other. In one such debate on a news channel, the debate moderator, Kate McCann fainted on stage due to which the debate halted, immediately.

56th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On 6 September 2022, she became the 56th Prime Minister and the 3rd woman Prime Minister of the UK.

Her husband, Hugh O’Leary, congratulating Liz Truss after she was chosen to become the Prime Minister of the UK

Her Standpoint on Economics and Foreign Policy

Liz is a true believer of Economic liberalism and a supporter of free trade. In 2011, she founded the Free Enterprise Group of Conservative MPs, which is a free-market collection of parliamentarians, arguing for a more entrepreneurial economy and fewer employment laws. In 2022, she called Saudi Arabia an ally but did not approve of the country’s policies. In an interview, she said,

We have to work with all of our allies around the world including Saudi Arabia to find alternative sources. Saudi Arabia is not a global security threat in the way that Russia is and we have to work with them.” [16] Indy100

When the interviewer said that the condition of women in Saudi Arabia was terrible and disgusting, Liz replied,

I am not condoning the policies of Saudi Arabia, what I am saying is we are in an existential threat and we need to find alternative sources of oil and gas so we are no longer dependent on Vladimir Putin and his appalling regime.” [17] Indy100

Her Point of View on Brexit

Liz Truss had fluctuating views on the Brexit referendum during and after the referendum. During the Brexit referendum that took place on 23 June 2016, Liz supported that the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union, while after the referendum, she changed her views and started supporting Brexit and said,

I don’t want my daughters to grow up in a world where they need a visa or permit to work in Europe, or where they are hampered from growing a business because of extortionate call costs and barriers to trade. Every parent wants their children to grow up in a healthy environment with clean water, fresh air and thriving natural wonders. Being part of the EU helps protect these precious resources and spaces.” [18] Evening Standard

In 2017, she revealed that she would vote for Brexit if another referendum takes place and said,

I believed there would be massive economic problems but those haven’t come to pass and I’ve also seen the opportunities.” [19] Politics Home

Her Opinion on Social and Cultural Issues

In an interview, while talking about woke aggression and cancel culture, she said,

The Conservative party should reject the zero-sum game of identity politics, we reject the illiberalism of cancel culture, and we reject the soft bigotry of low expectations that holds so many people back.” [20] The Guardian

While speaking in a meeting at a convention about her duties as a women and equalities minister, she shared that she does not agree with identity politics and said,

I don’t agree with the idea that you should have different policies for women or men. What I think is you should make sure your policies are accessible to everybody, so you should be, in the criminal justice system, making sure women are being treated fairly, gay people are being treated fairly, black people are being treated fairly.” [21] The Guardian

According to Reuters, she has always supported and voted for gay marriage and LGBTQ+ rights, but her views on transgenders are not liberal as she believes that transgenders should have limited rights. She said that transgender people should not have the right to self-identify as a different gender without medical check-ups and that only women have a cervix. Liz, who earlier supported single-sex services, later, in February 2022, wrote a letter to Equalities and Human Rights Commission in which she mentioned that the government was not interested in stopping transgender people from using single-sex toilets or changing rooms. In the letter, she wrote,

The Equality Act makes it clear that providers have the right to restrict use of spaces on the basis of sex as currently takes place. The Government has no interest in changing the current situation where transgender people are able to use facilities of their chosen gender. I very much support your attempts to correct the record and know that you will be seeking to engage and reassure LGBT groups on these issues privately too.” [22] The i The letter written by Liz to Equalities and Human Rights Commission

Tumultuous First Few Weeks of Her Leadership

After some dramatic U-turns in British politics in the first few weeks of her leadership, she had to apologize in October 2022. Jeremy Hunt, her new Chancellor, reversed her entire tax-cutting agenda after she sacked her close ally Kwasi Kwarteng. To break the stagnation of the economy, Truss and Kwarteng unveiled 45 billion pounds of unfunded tax cuts in September 2022. However, bond investors responded brutally, causing borrowing costs to rise and lenders to pull mortgage offers, resulting in the Bank of England intervening to prevent pension funds from going bankrupt. Investor confidence evaporated, her poll ratings plummeted, and she apologized for “mistakes” in her program. Liz Truss, while rendering an apology for her mistakes, said,

I do want to accept responsibility and say sorry for the mistakes that have been made.”

Shortest-serving PM

After ditching most of her economic policies that led to political turmoil in her government, she was forced to resign on 20 October 2022. Liz Truss became the shortest-serving PM in British history after resigning. [23] BBC Following her resignation, she delivered a speech outside Downing Street. Ms Truss said,

I recognise that I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party.”

Controversy

In 2019, Liz went to Australia on a trade tour, where she clicked pictures while riding a Brompton bicycle, which is manufactured in London, and posing in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge under the rain. Taking this picture and some others like it cost more than £2,500. Reportedly, she hired a personal photographer for her visit to Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and the photographer was paid with taxpayers’ money. Under the Freedom of Information Act, it was revealed that she also charged £1,190 for her PR-related activities. She was trolled on social media for doing personal branding on official tours. [24] BuzzFeed News

Liz in a picture captured in front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge under the rain

As of July 2022, Liz Truss’ net worth was reported to be £8.4 million. [25] Express

Facts/Trivia

• In childhood, everyone at home used to call her by her middle name Elizabeth. [26] YOU

As one of the largest groups of freedom-loving democracies, we must ensure there are clear benefits to remaining a member of the Commonwealth and offer nations a clear alternative to the growing malign influence from Beijing.” [27] The Hindu

• Reportedly, Liz Truss is known for her strained relations with bureaucrats for which she has also earned the titles like “Miss Dynamite” and the “human hand grenade.” [28] Eastern Daily Press
• She has a family residence located in the market town of Thetford, Norfolk, which is considered her main residence. She has another house with three bedrooms, which is situated 30 miles away from Norwich; it was used for filming Dad’s Army (1968-1977), a popular TV series. She also has a property in London. [29] Evening Standard

Liz making Christmas pudding

I remember standing in the Paisley piazza and we were chanting that slogan and other slogans. It was in Scottish so it was ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, oot, oot, oot.’” [31] Daily Record

Liz on the cover page of YOU magazine

Liz Truss meeting Queen Elizabeth II after becoming the 56th Prime Minister of England

Liz Truss giving the speech in front of 10 Downing Street in London on 6 September 2022

• The government formed by Liz Truss, after she became the Prime Minister, is the first government which does not have a white man appointed for holding the top 4 offices of state. [33] Bloomberg Kwasi Kwarteng was chosen as Chancellor, Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, James Cleverly as Foreign Secretary, and Therese Coffey as Deputy Prime Minister and Health Secretary. [34] BBC News

References [+] [−]

Related Posts

Vasundhara Raje Wiki, Age, Caste, Husband, Children, Family, Biography & More

Chandra Kumar Bose Wiki, Age, Wife, Family, Biography & More

Humza Yousaf Wiki, Age, Caste, Wife, Family, Biography & More

Bhaskar Rao Wiki, Age, Wife, Family, Biography & More

Harish Dwivedi Wiki, Age, Caste, Wife, Family, Biography & More

Bhupendra Patel Wiki, Age, Caste, Wife, Family, Biography & More

Pankaj Modi Wiki, Age, Wife, Family, Biography & More

Yar Muhammad Rind Wiki, Age, Caste, Wife, Family, Biography & More

Swati Maliwal Wiki, Age, Husband, Family, Biography & More

Alka Lamba Wiki, Age, Husband, Family, Children, Caste, Biography & More

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

Become an FT subscriber

Try unlimited access Only $1 for 4 weeks

Then $75 per month. Complete digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Cancel anytime during your trial.

• Global news & analysis
• Expert opinion
• Special features
• FirstFT newsletter
• Videos & Podcasts
• Android & iOS app
• FT Edit app
• 10 gift articles per month

Explore more offers.

Standard digital.

• FT Digital Edition

Premium Digital

Print + premium digital, weekend print + standard digital, weekend print + premium digital.

Today's FT newspaper for easy reading on any device. This does not include ft.com or FT App access.

• 10 additional gift articles per month
• Global news & analysis
• Exclusive FT analysis
• Videos & Podcasts
• FT App on Android & iOS
• Everything in Standard Digital
• Premium newsletters
• Weekday Print Edition
• FT Weekend Print delivery
• Everything in Premium Digital

Essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

• Everything in Print

Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders. Pay a year upfront and save 20%.

Terms & Conditions apply

Explore our full range of subscriptions.

Why the ft.

See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times.

International Edition

‘She still carries an aura of spectacular failure’: why hasn’t Liz Truss gone away?

Her 49 days in power ended in catastrophe, yet the shortest serving prime minister in British history is back, launching a new conservative movement with global ambitions. You just can’t keep a bad politician down …

T he brief and calamitous premiership of Liz Truss broke all sorts of political records. It was the shortest by far in British history – just 49 days , though oddly in those seven weeks she became the first prime minister since Churchill to serve under two monarchs. Her approval rating before she resigned – 9% – was the worst yet recorded by any modern UK party leader. The botched emergency budget she introduced with her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, saw the pound fall to its lowest ever level against the dollar ($1.03). But perhaps the most salient fact about Truss’s time in office is that when it ended, she became the youngest ex-PM since William Pitt the Younger at the start of the 19th century. She was 47 when she quit Downing Street. Half a political lifetime still lay ahead of her if she could find some way to fill it.

Truss is now 48, the same age as John Profumo when his seemingly glittering career ended in scandal and disgrace in 1963. Profumo was also relatively young in political terms. Yet he knew there was no way back after he had not only destroyed his own reputation but likely wrecked the electoral prospects of the Conservative party. He chose to leave the Commons immediately and went to work at Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in the East End of London, where 40 years of fundraising earned him a CBE. Kwarteng has likewise decided to step down as an MP, though it seems likely he will spend his time in the City of London rather than the East End. But stepping back from the fray is not the Liz Truss way.

Instead, she seems to be modelling herself on another public figure who crashed and burned shortly after reaching the pinnacle of his profession. The 45 days between Truss arriving in Downing Street and announcing her resignation were just one more than the 44 disastrous days Brian Clough spent as manager of Leeds United in 1974. Clough had inherited the reigning English First Division champions, widely considered one of the best teams in Europe. But he decided they were overrated, their trophies won by playing football the wrong way. He was determined to put that right and started by telling his new squad they were cheats. It didn’t work: Clough alienated the players, club staff and directors, who soon decided enough was enough and sacked him. His precipitate failure was a humiliation for such a strident and self-confident man.

What saved him was that it was over so quickly. He was able to say, as he did in a notorious TV interview with his predecessor, Don Revie, on the night of his departure, that he hadn’t been given enough time to tackle the deep-seated problems he had inherited. That the people who fired him were cowards, and he was the victim of vested interests who never wanted him to succeed in the first place. Being kicked out after barely a month was evidence that he never stood a chance. He needed to start again by finding a new outfit he could properly mould in his own image – which he eventually did when he became manager of Nottingham Forest.

Truss also appears to believe that lasting little more than a month in a job she had aspired to all her adult life is evidence not of her profound incompetence but of her virtue. The dark forces arrayed against her – what she once dubbed the “ anti-growth coalition ” and now calls, depending on her audience, the “quangocracy” or “communists” – were determined that she wouldn’t succeed. The problems she inherited were so entrenched – and her enemies so attached to a status quo on which their own status depended – that she was unable to make headway against them. She got the job because enough people understood change was desperately needed. She lost it because not enough of the ones who count had either the courage or the incentive to see serious reform through. They chickened out before she stood a chance.

L ike Clough, Truss is now in search of a new outfit to mould in her own image. She knows this is unlikely to be the parliamentary Conservative party, which will take a long time to get over the trauma she put it through. So she has hitched her wagon to a newly launched organisation called Popular Conservatism – or PopCon for short . It seeks to champion a low-tax, small-state, libertarian brand of rightwing politics. What makes it distinctive, however, is its all-comprehending view of the forces lined up against it. These include the Conservative party in Westminster, the law courts, the civil service and the media, which have all been infected with a stifling economic conformism. The official opposition to the current government barely gets a look-in when it comes to the PopCon demonology because the problem is not winning elections. The problem is being able to govern even when the official opposition has been routed, as happened in 2019. Getting into power is no longer sufficient. The real job is to dismantle the embedded, unelected power structures of the British state.

The PopCon mission statement makes the scale of the challenge clear. It declares: “Successive Conservative leaders and governments have discovered that a majority in the House of Commons is no longer enough to turn us away from the path of Blairite declinism. The institutions of Britain – from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) to the Supreme Court to the Climate Change Committee – now also stand in the way of meaningful reform.”

Popular Conservatism exists to give voice to the policy preferences of the millions of voters who keep winning elections, then find that nothing has changed. They are the real victims here. “We want to ensure that those who share the values of taking back control see the policies they support enacted.”

These lines come from a tatty, one-page leaflet handed out at Popular Conservatism’s official launch, in a church hall in Westminster in early February. It attracted a sizeable if motley crowd. I was there, along with various other rubberneckers from the press. The disgraced historian David Starkey sat a few seats away. Nigel Farage toured the back of the room, flitting from one TV camera to another, looking impossibly sleek and glowing with malice. But the bulk of the audience seemed made up of PopCon’s natural constituency: the eager beaver young men (and the occasional woman) who work at the rightwing thinktanks that populate Tufton Street, just down the road.

Here is where any sporting analogies break down: I have never been among such unhealthy-looking people. It wasn’t just the pallid complexions (this was also, unsurprisingly, an extremely white audience). Quite a few were overweight, their three-piece suits and tightly buttoned shirts straining to contain them. The room also had a distinct and increasingly unfamiliar odour: stale cigarette smoke. As no smoking was allowed here, they must have brought it in with them, from wherever they would normally gather to exercise their freedom to resist the dead hand of the nanny state. These people, it was clear, were out of shape on principle.

Truss was the star turn, and she spoke last. The warm-up acts included Mark Littlewood, former director general of the Institute for Economic Affairs (55 Tufton Street), now director of Popular Conservatism (which he mistakenly referred to as “Popular Conservativism” throughout). Littlewood began with a few housekeeping remarks, which meant gleefully pointing out that by having so many people crammed into an inadequate space,they were in breach of the building’s health and safety regulations. He was followed by Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson (then still a Tory MP, before his recent defection to Reform UK , though he was already showing clear signs of strain) and Mhairi Fraser, the prospective Conservative candidate for Epsom and Ewell, who railed against Covid lockdowns, smoking bans and the dark threat of restrictions on an Englishman’s right to buy two packets of biscuits. I think the idea was to make Truss look statesmanlike.

In a way, it worked. When she spoke, she had an intensity the others lacked. In part it was because she still carries such an aura of spectacular failure that any public appearance looks like a triumph of will. But it was also because she had the broader vision. Rees-Mogg simply rehearsed some tired lines about the continuing hold of EU law on post-Brexit Britain. Anderson moaned about the petty irritations of net zero targets. But Truss went further, looking to join the dots to explain why Britain has hit the buffers. It turns out the country is in the grip of a debilitating form of groupthink, all the more pernicious for being a combination of ideology and lifestyle choice. The ideology is what she calls communism – by which she seems to mean state interference in the free market coupled with weaponised identity politics. The lifestyle is Islington dinner party chic – lefty whingeing over the Ottolenghi sharing platters along with more identity politics. This ideology and lifestyle between them have infiltrated all the commanding heights of the media-legal-bureaucratic complex that runs the country.

As she says it, she sounds as if she believes it, which presumably she has to, or else she wouldn’t be here but would instead be serving out her penance in a soup kitchen somewhere. As I listened to her banging on, her eyes oddly glassy as though looking for something just over the horizon, she strongly reminded me of someone but I couldn’t put my finger on who it was. Then it came to me. In her mix of utter conviction and utter obliviousness to how she might come across to anyone who doesn’t see the world the way she does, the politician she most resembles is Jeremy Corbyn. Like him, Truss is convinced the policies she advocates are popular with a majority of the public. For Corbyn it was nationalisation of the utilities, more money for the NHS and cheaper housing, all of which poll extremely well. For Truss it is secure borders, lower taxes and an end to burdensome environmental restrictions. In both cases, the explanation for why the things the public want never come to pass is the same: the system is stacked against the preferences of ordinary people.

The difference is that, in Truss’s case, she did become prime minister, being forced to quit only when the markets turned against her. Had Corbyn’s policy programme during his first weeks in office produced a run on the pound, he might well have felt it was all of a piece: the unaccountable power of the City of London features high in his demonology of the forces arrayed against him. But Truss believes in the wisdom of the markets. It is the unaccountable power of quangos, civil servants and law courts she fundamentally mistrusts. So what caused the banks and the currency exchanges to turn against her? Are they communists, too?

She had no answer to this question at the launch of PopCon, not least because she did not take any questions. But in front of a very different audience at the Institute for Government (IfG) last September, she tackled what had gone wrong head on. She told a roomful of financial journalists and policy wonks that her economic plans had been scuppered by the failure of key institutions to support her. The Bank of England had cavilled at her proposals at a time when monetary policy was tightening because of its own inattention to the risks of inflation; the OBR had leaked that it believed there was a £70bn hole in her forecasts without having done the legwork to cost them properly; the BBC and wider media had failed to challenge the quangocrats on these failures while mercilessly laying into Truss and Kwarteng. “Why don’t you give the governor of the Bank of England as hard a time as you always give politicians?” Truss asked Faisal Islam of the BBC, when he questioned her on her failure to secure backing for her budget. But she didn’t need to ask – she already knew the answer. Her opponents in the Bank, the Treasury and the media were all on the same “London dinner party circuit”.

There are two basic problems with this analysis of why she failed. First, her argument that the markets were spooked by some media backchat – which she believes was ideologically motivated – hardly sits well with her belief in their innate wisdom. The point of a free-market approach is that serious money is meant to see through the ideological bullshit. Truss insists that only immediate tax cuts, deregulation and supply-side reforms can rescue the sclerotic British economy. The markets should have understood that – whatever the BBC might say. Instead, when she and Kwarteng launched their assault on the pieties of the stale economic consensus, the serious money fled for the hills. That means either Truss was wrong in her prospectus for the economy or she is wrong in her faith in the markets. If City traders can take fright at a bit of dinner party pushback, then maybe Corbyn is right after all: the markets really are not to be trusted.

The other problem is the one she shares with Clough: this was the team she inherited. When Clough arrived at Leeds he wanted a clear-out of the established players, but that was bound to take time. In the meantime, these were the players he had and they were the only ones who could win matches for him out on the pitch. Calling them cheats seriously disincentivised them to do that. Truss must have known when she took office that the Bank of England, the Treasury and the OBR were the institutions that mattered if she wanted to get her policies through, even if she also hated the fact that she would have to rely on them. Over time she could have swapped out their key personnel, but to start with she had to work with what was there. Calling them part of the conspiracy against her was likely to turn that into a self-fulfilling prophecy, just as calling your players whiners and losers will make them exactly that.

after newsletter promotion

Both at the IfG and at PopCon Truss repeated a line that has become part of her new stump speech mantra: it is not enough to will the ends if you don’t also will the means. In other words, it can be easy to know what’s popular, or even right, but unless you also understand how to get things done, it doesn’t matter what you want to achieve. But she’s kidding herself if she thinks the means to getting things done is to bypass the institutions of the bureaucratic state. This is in many ways the persistent flaw in libertarian thinking: an assumption that the power of powerful state institutions can be countered by simply ignoring them. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only organisation that has the power to limit the power of the state is the state itself. That means any serious project of reform has to be a long game. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got.

T russ must know that she is not going to get a chance to have another go herself. Her party is on its way out of government and it may not be back for a long time. Even if the coming general election produces a rump Conservative party in Westminster that turns to a leader from one of its far-right factions, it will not be Truss, and nor will it be Rees-Mogg. They are damaged goods, whatever your ideological persuasion. Mark Littlewood acknowledged at the launch of PopCon that his new organisation was not in the business of trying to find someone to replace Rishi Sunak. He said that the Tories’ five families of infighters and backstabbers were enough – no one needed a sixth. And he is right: nothing about Popular Conservatism suggests a group of people who have discovered their path back to power.

Yet despite this, Truss presents herself and her new movement as being on the right side of history. The tide, she says, is turning their way. That’s because they are looking beyond these shores and her recent local difficulties. Her perspective is now international. Littlewood pointed out that although the centre left looks as if it’s winning in Britain, the country is an outlier. A year of elections around the world is likely to see the populist right on the march, from India to the EU to the US. Trump’s name was not mentioned at PopCon, but his presence hovered menacingly in the background. Who cares if Starmer pushes out Sunak as it will just mean more of the same? What counts is the possibility of a global reset starting in Washington.

Next month, Truss is publishing a book called Ten Years to Save the West (it is strictly embargoed, though most of its contents have been trailed in her public pronouncements – she was already plugging it at the IfG back in September). In late February she travelled to the US to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the largest annual gathering of American conservative activists and their international allies. Addressing a half-empty room alongside a 6 January truther, she said she had been ousted from office by “the usual suspects”. She encouraged American conservatives to elect politicians who won’t cave in to the woke establishment, even if it means “they don’t get invited to any dinner parties”. For a politician touting an international vision, she still manages to sound remarkably parochial.

She may also have misjudged the sympathies of her audience. Though touting herself as an outsider who spoke truth to unaccountable power and paid the price, her critics on the far right point out that she is also the ultimate insider, whose route to the top involved a series of ministerial roles in the Cameron, May and Johnson administrations, including as minister for women and equalities, where she championed LGBTQ+ rights. She opposed Brexit in 2016. She was once a Liberal Democrat. Raheem Kassam, former UK editor of Breitbart news and a one-time Ukip policy adviser, now based in the US, called Truss’s appearance at CPAC “one of the most transparent and pathetic grifts going”. Jack Montgomery, writing in the National Pulse, noted that as foreign secretary Truss had made it clear there could be no deals and no compromise with Putin over the invasion of Ukraine. That, for many in the Maga movement, is the equivalent of being a signed-up member of the Joe Biden/CIA/Nato conspiracy. “So no,” Montgomery wrote, “Liz Truss wasn’t ousted by the deep state. Liz Truss is the deep state.” If there is a global reset coming in Washington, Truss seems unlikely to be a part of it.

M eanwhile, there is trouble brewing back home. Truss won her South West Norfolk constituency in 2019 with 69% of the vote and a majority of more than 26,000, one of the largest in the country. This time, though, it seems likely she will be facing a challenge not just from Labour but from a local independent, James Bagge, a 71-year-old former army officer and barrister seeking to capitalise on local discontent. “I look like a Tory and sound like a Tory,” he tells me, “but I’m not a Tory.” He does indeed sound like a Tory, albeit of an earlier generation: “A lot of people find themselves in the poo” is how he describes the state of the economy. He plans to run a campaign focused on local issues, drawing inspiration from David Tully, the vehicle repair shop owner and political novice who came a strong second in the recent Rochdale byelection. Truss has been the MP for South West Norfolk for 14 years, during which, Bagge says, she has not endeared herself to her constituents, who have noticed her tendency to use them for photo ops without doing much to address their concerns. “There was remarkably little excitement here when she became PM,” he recalls. It seemed of a piece with her tendency to prefer being somewhere else.

Her recent jaunts to the US to broadcast her belief that the woke establishment did her in have done nothing to remedy that. The problem she faces locally is not just that her argument seems implausible coming from someone who was so clearly part of the political establishment. It’s also utterly irrelevant to constituents whose everyday difficulties revolve round housing, healthcare, transport and a lack of opportunity or support for disaffected young people, and whose lives became considerably more challenging after her premiership led to a sharp hike in mortgage rates. Bagge has no idea if he stands a chance, but current disaffection with mainstream politics suggests anything is possible. Still, a general election is not a byelection and a majority such as hers will take some shifting.

So what does the future hold for her? Truss is nothing if not indefatigable. Her rise to the top was a triumph of thick-skinned determination over repeated ridicule. For a long time she was widely known – and mocked – as the politician who set herself up as a take-no-prisoners champion of British dairy products. “We import two-thirds of our cheese. That … Is … A … Disgrace!” she told the Tory party conference in 2014 – yet she still managed to become prime minister. Now, to her shamelessness and her strongly held but scattergun convictions – both invaluable political qualities – she can add her sense of victimhood. There is a reason the Islington dinner-party types laughed at her: they wanted her gone because they couldn’t stomach what she stands for. Let the haters hate. She knows it says more about them than about her.

But what she hasn’t got – and shows no sign of finding – is a vehicle for her political vision that stands a chance of putting it into practice. If the right of the Conservative party turns itself once again into a serious electoral force, it is more likely to be Farage calling the shots than Truss and her allies. PopCon has gone pretty quiet. If I hadn’t held on to that tatty leaflet, there would be nothing to say what they stand for. Littlewood insisted they’re in it for the long haul – searching for the candidates of the future who could reconnect conservative politics to the views of ordinary people. By the time they find them, Truss will no longer even be news.

When Clough left Leeds, his career hung in the balance. After a brief period in the wilderness, he found his redemption in Nottingham. If he hadn’t, he would have been known as an early achiever who couldn’t cut it at the highest level. No doubt he would have continued to tour the television studios to let the world know how he had been stitched up, and how the people who came after him were just the same old conformists, and how the powers that be had their snouts so deep in the trough, they couldn’t see what was good for them. But after a while the act would have got tired and his audience would have had enough. And Brian Clough was a lot funnier and more charismatic than Liz Truss.

• Conservatives

More on this story

Hoopla around Truss and Rayner shows Michael Ashcroft still steering the debate

‘Five-year-old on acid’: Liz Truss’s Ten Years to Save the West, digested by John Crace

Trussonomic lessons: what can be learned from former PM’s book?

Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss review – shamelessly unrepentant

Liz Truss has kindly offered to ‘save the west’. But who will save her from her delusions?

What does Liz Truss’s book tell us about her American ambitions?

There’s a gaping hole at the centre of the Tory party where ideas should be. The risk is Liz Truss will fill it

Senior Tories fear Johnson and Truss will sabotage Sunak’s election campaign

Liz Truss quiz: did she really say that in her book?

The greatest mystery of modern politics? Liz Truss’s self belief

Most viewed.