Liz Truss: From teenage anti-monarchical Liberal Democrat to UK Premier

Liz Truss has been appointed the UK’s new prime minister by the Queen shortly after Boris Johnson had tendered his resignation to Her Majesty. But where did she come from and what makes her tick?

A Remain supporter who has become the darling of the Brexit-backing Conservative right wing. A former Liberal Democrat activist, who marched against Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, but who now claims to be the keeper of the Thatcherite flame.

It is fair to say that Mary Elizabeth Truss has been on a political journey. She may not be a household name like her predecessor at Number 10 – and she was not the first choice of Tory MPs to replace Boris Johnson.

But her promise to return to fundamental Conservative values – cutting taxes and shrinking the state – proved to be exactly what party members, who got the final say over who took over from Mr Johnson, wanted to hear.

And, crucially, as foreign secretary she remained loyal to Mr Johnson until the bitter end as other ministers deserted him, winning her favour with Johnson loyalists.

Grassroots Tory supporters of Liz Truss see in her the steadfast, tenacious and determined qualities they admired in Margaret Thatcher – an image Ms Truss herself has tried to cultivate.

But despite her shifting political positions and allegiances over the years, these words also come up frequently when friends and family are asked to describe her character – along with “ambitious”.

Age: 47

Place of birth: Oxford

Home: London and Norfolk

Education: Roundhay School in Leeds, Oxford University

Family: Married to accountant Hugh O’Leary with two teenage daughters

Parliamentary constituency: South West Norfolk

“She’s a very opinionated person in terms of what she wants,” said her brother Francis in 2017, when recalling his older sister’s teenage dalliance with vegetarianism.

“When you go to a restaurant, you might be 14 but she was precocious about what she wants, what she didn’t want.”

When the family played Cluedo or Monopoly, “she was someone who had to win,” added Francis in a BBC Radio 4 profile of Truss.

“She would create some special system to work out how she could win.”

Maurizio Giuliano, a university contemporary who first met her at a Liberal Democrat event, says she stood out from the other students.

“I remember her being very well-dressed compared to other 18 to 19-year-olds. She also had the demeanour of a real adult compared to what we were at that age.

“She was forceful and opinionated and she had very strong views.”

Serious political debate was the order of the day in the Truss household, according to Francis, the youngest of her three younger brothers.

“You didn’t sit around talking about the latest Megadrive game at the dinner table, it was much more issues, political campaigns etc,” he told Radio 4’s Profile programme.

It must have felt inevitable that she would get involved in politics in some capacity when she grew up, but no-one in her family would have predicted the path she eventually took.

Born in Oxford in 1975, Ms Truss has described her father, a mathematics professor, and her mother, a nurse, as “left-wing”.

As a young girl, her mother took her on marches for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an organisation vehemently opposed to the Thatcher government’s decision to allow US nuclear warheads to be installed at RAF Greenham Common, west of London.

Though she is now proudly a Conservative from Leeds, back then she was a Scottish liberal.

The family moved to Paisley, just west of Glasgow, when Ms Truss was four-years-old.

In a BBC interview, she recalled shouting “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie – oot, oot, oot,” in a Scottish accent, as she took part in marches.

The Truss family later decamped to Leeds, where she attended Roundhay, a state secondary school. She has described seeing “children who failed and were let down by low expectations” during her time there.

Some of Ms Truss’s contemporaries at Roundhay have disputed her account of the school, including Guardian journalist Martin Pengelly, who wrote: “Perhaps she is selectively deploying her upbringing, and casually traducing the school and teachers who nurtured her, for simple political gain.”

One Roundhay school mate, who did not want to be named, told the BBC: “It was a really good school, really supportive teachers. Quite a lot of us have gone on to good universities and good careers.”

Although not part of her friendship group, he has clear memories of the young Truss.

“She was quite studious, serious,” he says, with a “heavy social conscience” and part of a group that were into environmentalism.

“I remember a school trip to Sellafield and her asking difficult questions and giving them a grilling. I remember that quite distinctly.”

At Oxford University, Ms Truss read philosophy, politics and economics. Friends recall a well-liked, if frenetic student.

“I remember her determination which was very impressive for me,” says Jamshid Derakhshan, who was studying for a postgrad degree in mathematics when Truss was an undergraduate.

“She was very quick with everything. Going around the college quickly, being everywhere.”

As to what sort of prime minister his old friend will make, Dr Derakhshan says: “My feeling is she’s not going to be stuck with one particular idea, she’s very flexible in her mind and what will be best for the time.”

Ms Truss was involved in many campaigns and causes at Oxford but devoted much of her time to politics, becoming president of the university’s Liberal Democrats.

At the party’s 1994 conference, she spoke in favour of abolishing the monarchy, telling delegates in Brighton: “We Liberal Democrats believe in opportunity for all. We do not believe people are born to rule.”

She also campaigned for the decriminalisation of cannabis.

“Liz had a very strong radical liberal streak to her,” said fellow Lib Dem student Alan Renwick in 2017.

“We were setting up the Freshers Fair stall, Liz was there with a pile of posters, saying ‘Free the Weed’ and she just wanted the whole stall to be covered with these posters.

“I was scurrying around after Liz trying to take these down and put up a variety of messages, rather than just this one message all over the stall.”

Her conversion to conservatism, towards the end of her time at Oxford is said to have shocked her left-leaning parents, but for Mark Littlewood, a fellow Oxford Lib Dem, it was a natural progression.

“She’s been a market liberal all of her adult life,” according to Mr Littlewood, who is now director general of the libertarian, free market think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs.

“Her political career reflects her ideology – she has always been highly sceptical of big government and privileged institutions who think they know best,” Mr Littlewood said.

She clearly changed parties, but that “was a judgement about what’s the best and most likely vehicle for her to succeed in politics and get what she wants to get done,” Mr Littlewood said.

Nevertheless, what she has described as her “dubious past” came back to haunt her as she tried to convince Tory members she was truly one of them.

At a leadership hustings in Eastbourne, some in the audience jeered, as she told them: “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 had become a Conservative because she had met like-minded people who shared her commitment to “personal freedom, the ability to shape your own life and shape your own destiny,” she explained.

After graduating from Oxford she worked as an accountant for Shell, and Cable & Wireless, and married fellow accountant Hugh O’Leary in 2000. The couple have two children.

Ms Truss stood as the Tory candidate for Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, in the 2001 general election, but lost. Ms Truss suffered another defeat in Calder Valley, also in West Yorkshire, in 2005.

But, her political ambitions undimmed, she was elected as a councillor in Greenwich, south-east London, in 2006, and from 2008 also worked for the right-of-centre Reform think tank.

Conservative leader David Cameron put Ms Truss on his “A-list” of priority candidates for the 2010 election and she was selected to stand for the safe seat of South West Norfolk.

But she quickly faced a battle against de-selection by the constituency Tory association, after it was revealed she had had an affair with Tory MP Mark Field some years earlier.

The effort to oust her failed and Ms Truss went on to win the seat by more than 13,000 votes.

She co-authored a book, Britannia Unchained, with four other Conservative MPs elected in 2010, which recommended stripping back state regulation to boost the UK’s position in the world, marking her out as a prominent advocate of free market policies on the Tory benches.

During a BBC leadership debate, she was challenged about a comment in Britannia Unchained, describing British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world”. She insisted she had not written it.

In 2012, just over two years after becoming an MP, she entered government as an education minister and in 2014 was promoted to environment secretary.

At the 2014 Conservative conference, she made a speech in which she said, in an impassioned voice: “We import two-thirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace.”

The speech was little noticed at the time, but it has taken on a life of its own on social media, attracting much mockery and becoming widely shared.

Two years later came arguably the biggest political event in a generation – the EU referendum.

Ms Truss campaigned for Remain, writing in the Sun newspaper that Brexit would be “a triple tragedy – more rules, more forms and more delays when selling to the EU”.

However, after her side lost, she changed her mind, arguing that Brexit provided an opportunity to “shake up the way things work”.

Under Theresa May’s premiership, she became the first female Lord Chancellor and justice secretary, but she had several high-profile clashes with the judiciary.

Her initial failure to defend judges after they were branded “enemies of the people” by the Daily Mail, when they ruled Parliament had to be given a vote on triggering Brexit, upset the legal establishment.

She later issued a statement supporting the judges, but she was criticised by Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd as “completely and absolutely wrong” for not speaking out sooner.

After 11 months as justice secretary, she was demoted to chief secretary to the Treasury.

When Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, Ms Truss was moved to international trade secretary – a job which meant meeting global political and business leaders to promote UK PLC.

In 2021, aged 46, she moved to one of the most senior jobs in government, taking over from Dominic Raab as foreign secretary.

In this role she has sought to solve the knotty problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol, by scrapping parts of a post-Brexit EU-UK deal – a move the EU fiercely criticised.

She secured the release of two British-Iranian nationals who had both been arrested and detained in Iran.

And when Russia invaded Ukraine in February she took a hard line, insisting all of Vladimir Putin’s forces should be driven from the country.

But she faced criticism for backing people from the UK who wanted to fight in Ukraine.

Her decision to pose for photographs in a tank while visiting British troops in Estonia, was seen as an attempt to emulate Margaret Thatcher, who had famously been pictured aboard a Challenger tank in 1986. It also fuelled speculation that she was on leadership manoeuvres.

Claims she was deliberately trying to channel Thatcher grew even louder when she posed for a photograph in a white pussy bow collar of the kind favoured by the Iron Lady.

But she has always dismissed such criticism, telling GB News: “It is quite frustrating that female politicians always get compared to Margaret Thatcher while male politicians don’t get compared to Ted Heath.”

Ms Truss’s campaign for the party leadership was not free of controversy.

Pressed on how she would tackle the cost-of-living crisis, she said she would focus her efforts on “lowering the tax burden, not giving out handouts”.

She has been forced to scrap a plan to link public sector pay to regional living costs by a backlash from senior Tories who said it would mean lower pay for millions of workers outside London.

And she called Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon an “attention seeker”, adding it was best to “ignore her”.

She also got into a spat with French President Emmanuel Macron, who accused her of “playing to the gallery” at a leadership hustings. Asked if Mr Macron was a “friend or foe”, she had said the jury was still out.

But it was domestic issues, or rather one domestic issue, that dominated the sometimes fractious leadership contest with Rishi Sunak.

Ms Truss’s response to the cost-of-living crisis, promised within days of taking office, is likely to define her premiership and her chances of gaining a mandate of her own at the next general election.

Source: bbc.com