A Hawkish Political Disrupter to Lead a Nation Facing Crisis

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss

As a passionate 19-year-old student at Oxford in 1994, Elizabeth Truss, called for a referendum to abolish the British monarchy, telling an audience of fellow Liberal Democrats, “We do not believe that people should be born to rule.”

Three decades later, Truss, now 47 and known as Liz, will travel to a Scottish castle on Tuesday to be anointed by Queen Elizabeth II as Britain’s new prime minister, completing a political odyssey from rabble-rousing republican to the tradition-cloaked leader of the Conservative Party.

Truss long ago pivoted to embrace the monarchy as being good for British democracy, just as she long ago abandoned the Liberal Democrats for the Conservatives. More recently, she switched sides on Brexit, opposing the drive for Britain to leave the European Union before the 2016 referendum, then reversing course to become one of its most ardent evangelists.

Her ideological dexterity — critics would call it opportunism — has helped propel Truss to the pinnacle of British politics. How well it will prepare her for the rigors of the job is another question, given the dire economic trends enveloping the country, and a Tory party that seems torn between the desire for a fresh start and regret about tossing out her flamboyant, larger-than-life predecessor, Boris Johnson.

By her own admission, Truss has little of Johnson’s charisma. Awkward where he is easygoing, staccato where he is smooth, she nevertheless scaled the party’s ranks with what colleagues describe as nerve, drive, and an appetite for disruptive politics. When Johnson fell into trouble, she positioned herself adroitly, never publicly breaking with him while staying in the spotlight as a hawkish foreign secretary.

“She has so much confidence in her instincts,” said Marc Stears, a political scientist who tutored Truss when she was at Oxford. “She is willing to take risks and say the kinds of things that other people aren’t willing to say. Sometimes, that works for her; other times, it hurts her.”

Wooden in public, Truss is fun in private, friends say, with a direct, informal manner, a weakness for karaoke and an unabashed love for pop star Taylor Swift. She once shared a selfie with Swift from an awards show, adding the caption, “Look what you made me do,” the title of one of Swift’s hit songs.

Truss will need all her instincts and agility to navigate the job she is inheriting from Johnson. Drummed out of office by his party’s lawmakers after a string of scandals, he has left behind a daunting pile of problems, not unlike those that confronted Margaret Thatcher when she became Britain’s first female prime minister in 1979 during a previous period of economic hardship.

Truss has modeled herself on Thatcher, posing on a tank like her hero once did in West Germany and wearing silk pussy-bow blouses, a staple of the Thatcher wardrobe. But her politics more closely resemble those of another hero of the right, Ronald Reagan: a clarion call for lower taxes and smaller government, coupled with a celebration of post-Brexit Britain as an “aspiration nation.”

That message appealed to the 1,60,000 or so mostly white and mostly aging members of the Conservative Party, who chose it over the hard truths offered by her opponent, Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the Exchequer. Now, she will have to pivot yet again, to lead a diverse, divided country facing its worst economic news in a generation.

“One of the things that has benefited Liz Truss is that she’s tribal,” said Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow at U.K. in a Changing Europe, a research institute in London. “She’s very willing to embrace everything about a team. The trouble with being a team player is she now needs to define the agenda.”

Born in 1975, four years before Thatcher took power, Truss grew up in an avowedly left-wing family, with a father who was a mathematician and a mother who was a teacher and nurse. She talks often of going to a public high school in the hard-knocks city of Leeds, which she said “let down” its students with low expectations, little opportunity, and a local council caught in the grip of political correctness.

Some of her contemporaries dispute her account of her school days. They note that she grew up in a comfortable district of the city that long voted Conservative. They also accuse her of slighting her teachers, who helped her gain admission — after a year living in Canada with her family — to Merton College, one of the most academically rigorous of the Oxford colleges.

Politics drew her early, and Truss became president of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats, where she campaigned to legalize marijuana. Soon after graduating in 1996, however, she switched to the Conservatives, a party then careering into the political wilderness. She worked in the private sector, for the energy giant Shell and for Cable & Wireless, qualifying as a chartered accountant.

In 2000, Truss married Hugh O’Leary, an accountant she met at a party conference and with whom she now has two daughters. Her personal life briefly threatened her career in 2005, after she had an extramarital relationship with a married member of Parliament, Mark Field, whom the party had appointed as her political mentor. Field’s marriage broke up; Truss’ survived.

Elected to Parliament in 2010 as a member for South West Norfolk, Truss went on to hold six ministerial jobs under three Conservative prime ministers. Her track record, people who know her said, was mixed, and she struggled with public speaking.

While few fault Truss for her youthful switch from Liberal Democrat to Tory, many criticize her retroactive endorsement of Brexit. “That’s not a serious answer,” Rutter said. “The evidence is mounting up that if you make trade with your biggest trading partner more difficult, it hurts your economy.”

The U-turn did not hinder her career. Truss cycled through jobs in the Justice Department and the Treasury before Johnson named her international trade minister in 2019. She roamed the world, signing post-Brexit trade agreements with Japan, Australia, and other countries. Analysts noted they were largely cut-and-paste versions of EU deals, but she reaped the publicity.

“Very early on, it appeared to me that she was a likely candidate for prime minister,” said Robert E. Lighthizer, who opened talks on a trans-Atlantic deal with Truss as President Donald Trump’s trade representative.

(Author: Mark Landler)/(c.2021 The New York Times Company)