Liz Truss, in case you’ve somehow managed to miss it, went to primary school in Paisley. She was also born in Oxford and attended secondary school in Leeds. This much-recited life story has allowed the Foreign Secretary to sell herself as a sort of patchwork of Britishness, running from south to north. One nation in one person – not a bad slogan for the next Queen Elizabeth.
It’s becoming ever harder to see how Truss will fail to become Tory leader and prime minister. What had initially seemed like a populist, erratic and risky economic platform is being embraced by Tory members as a challenge to stale, elite ways of thinking. It’s similar to the Brexit urge – time for change; two fingers to the establishment; what’s the worst that could happen? You can see initially sceptical Conservative commentators falling into line in real time. Is Truss actually a Thatcher figure, someone who will flout the orthodoxy and turn out to be right? If so, you don’t want to miss that bus. Alternatively, she may simply be the kind of minor, ill-suited oddball that sometimes pops up towards the end of exhausted governments. We shall see.
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