Elizabeth Truss, the 47-year-old Foreign Secretary of Britain who is on the verge of becoming leader of the Conservative party and the next prime minister of the United Kingdom, unlike her rival Rishi Sunak, is not a conventional Tory.
As a Liberal Democrat member in college, Truss addressed the party convention in 1994 asking for abolition of the Monarchy arguing, “We don’t believe people were born to rule.” She was also a supporter of the cannabis legislation and campaigned for “free the weed.”
As a young girl and under the influence of her left-leaning parents, Truss would often accompany her mother to marches of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament — an organisation vehemently opposed to Margaret Thatcher’s decision to allow US nuclear warheads to be installed at RAF Greenham Common in London.
But in the leadership battle of the Conservative party where the search is on for a decisive and strong leader, Truss has been trying to emulate Thatcher, one of Tory’s favourite leaders. From wearing a pussybow blouse to driving tanks and being photographed wearing a fur hat in Moscow’s Red Square, she has been busy convincing party members that she could shake-up the establishment as her idol — the ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher had done.
During the Brexit debate in the Conservative party, she had campaigned for remain. She felt Brexit would be a triple tragedy: more rules, more forms and more delays when selling to the EU. But when her side lost, she argued that Brexit provided an opportunity to “shake up the way things work.”
A party colleague from Lib-Dem days said, “It was difficult to figure out what she believed in as she was always playing to the gallery, rather than putting forward a genuine belief.”
Subsequently, many other politicians who came into her contact, felt the same way.
She was born in Oxford in 1975 and named Mary Elizabeth Truss, the eldest of four siblings and the only girl. But she hated her first name and preferred to be called Elizabeth.
Her father, John Kenneth Truss, was a professor of mathematics at the University of Leeds and her mother, Priscilla Mary, was a teacher and a nurse.
Later, her family moved to Leeds and she attended Roundhay, a state secondary school, after which she went to Oxford to read philosophy, politics and economics and was active in student politics as a Lib-Dem member.
While at Oxford, Truss switched to the Conservatives and joined the party in 1996 when factionalism was rampant under John Major’s leadership. She met her future husband, Hugh O’Leary, an accountant the following year at a Conservative party convention and they married in 2000.
Truss contested as a Tory candidate for Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, in the general election of 2001 and lost. She was defeated once again when she contested from another seat in west Yorkshire, Calder Valley in 2005.
But her determination to make a career in politics remained and she was elected as a councillor in Greenwich in 2006. Two years later she joined the right-of-centre Reform think tank.
Truss was introduced to party MP for Cities of London and Westminster, Mark Field as a mentor and to help her secure a more winnable seat in the next election. But the two got involved in an affair that ended Field’s 12-year marriage in divorce, while hers survived.
But her 18-month affair almost ruined her chance of representing the party in the parliament from the Tory safe seat South West Norfolk, due to strong opposition from local Tory members who wanted her replaced for concealing her affair to the selection committee.
But Truss managed to survive the crisis and won a vote supporting her as the candidate by 132 votes to 37.
Since becoming an MP in 2010, she has worked under three prime ministers and held six ministerial posts, becoming the first female lord chancellor in 2016 — the highest officer of the Crown.
Just after two years of becoming an MP, she entered the government as an education minister in 2012 and an environment secretary in 2014.
However, at the 2015 Conservative conference, she was mocked for saying in an impassioned voice: “We import two-thirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace.”
Truss does not enjoy public speaking and prefers closed-door meetings or small party gatherings. She also has a reputation among cabinet colleagues for leaking stories.
But she had the political instinct of being the first among her cabinet colleague to support Boris Johnson in the leadership race in 2019. After he became prime minister Truss was made international trade secretary that led her to travel around the world to negotiate trade deals with global political and business leaders.
In 2021, she was made the foreign secretary, one of the senior-most jobs in the government.
Her strong criticism of Vladimir Putin for the Ukraine war has led to a rise in her popularity among Tory members. Her success in securing the release of two British-Iranian nationals who were detained in Iran, also added to her rising stock.
In addition, Truss’s candidature has also found favour with Boris Johnson loyalists, as unlike Sunak and many other senior ministers, she had not switched sides and engaged in criticising the Johnson premiership.
But that is also the worry in many sections that if she wins one may see the same groups of people coming back to run the affairs of the new government.
“Liz is certainly very determined to get there, but the people won’t change that much and no one really knows what she might do if she gets there,” a party MP said.
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