Liz Truss

Liz Truss        (politician, puppet leader)
Born	1975-07-26 Oxford, England
Alma mater	Merton College (Oxford)
Religion	Christian
Spouse	Hugh O'Leary
Interest of	"Philip Cross"
Party	Conservative
A former Lib Dem who lasted just 45 days as Tory PM  UK/Prime Minister  In office 6 September 2022 - 25 October 2022 Deputy Thérèse Coffey Preceded by Boris Johnson Succeeded by Rishi Sunak  Leader of the Conservative Party  In office 5 September 2022 - 24 October 2022 Preceded by Boris Johnson Succeeded by Rishi Sunak  UK/Foreign Secretary  In office 15 September 2021 - 6 September 2022 Appointed by Boris Johnson Preceded by Dominic Raab Succeeded by James Cleverly  Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe In office 19 December 2021 - 6 September 2022 Appointed by Boris Johnson Preceded by David Frost  Minister for Women and Equalities  In office 10 September 2019 - 6 September 2022 Appointed by Boris Johnson Succeeded by Nadhim Zahawi  International Trade Secretary In office 24 July 2019 - 15 September 2021 Appointed by Boris Johnson Preceded by Liam Fox  President of the Board of Trade  In office 24 July 2019 - 15 September 2021 Appointed by Boris Johnson Preceded by Liam Fox  Chief Secretary to the Treasury  In office 11 June 2017 - 24 July 2019 Appointed by Theresa May Preceded by David Gauke Succeeded by Rishi Sunak  Secretary of State for Justice  In office 14 July 2016 - 11 June 2017 Appointed by Theresa May Preceded by Michael Gove Succeeded by David Lidington  Lord Chancellor  In office 14 July 2016 - 11 June 2017 Appointed by Theresa May Preceded by Michael Gove Succeeded by David Lidington  Secretary of State for Environment Food and Rural Affairs In office 15 July 2014 - 14 July 2016 Appointed by David Cameron Preceded by Owen Paterson Succeeded by Andrea Leadsom  Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Childcare and Education In office 4 September 2012 - 15 July 2014 Appointed by David Cameron  Member of Parliament for South West Norfolk In office 6 May 2010 - Present

Liz Truss is a British Tory politician who lasted just 45 days as UK Prime Minister. She was formerly Foreign Secretary and served in various cabinet positions under Prime Ministers David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss were the two remaining candidates in the July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election. The result was decided by a ballot of Conservative Party members, in which on a turnout of 83% she gained the support of 57.4% of the voters and 42.6% of the membership respectively, and Liz Truss was elected Leader of the Conservative Party on 5 September 2022.

On 20 October 2022, Liz Truss announced her resignation as Prime Minister, saying there would be a leadership election within a week.

Business Career

Truss worked as Chartered Management Accountant for Oil-kingpin Shell in 1999.

Kissing hands

Liz Truss officially became Britain’s new Prime Minister after meeting Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral on the morning of 6 September 2022. Following the meeting at Balmoral, Buckingham Palace released a statement, saying:

“The Queen received in Audience The Right Honourable Elizabeth Truss MP today and requested her to form a new Administration. Ms Truss accepted Her Majesty’s offer and kissed hands upon her appointment as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.”

“Kissing hands” is an old tradition which shows devout loyalty to the monarch by literally planting a kiss on their hand. The prime minister no longer actually kisses Queen Elizabeth’s hand, but the process of meeting the monarch and forming a government still has the same name.

Towering over the Queen

The picture provoked controversy on social media as Liz towers over the monarch, seeming like a giant next to the Queen who looks rather tiny. One person wrote on Twitter:

“How tall is Liz Truss? She looks like a giant towering over The Queen, who looks very frail and shrunken indeed.”

“Blimey! How small is the Queen these days?! I mean Liz Truss isn’t tall but looks like a giant here,” said another.

A third person added: “Not being funny but is the Queen tiny or is Liz Truss massive?”

“The PM is not tall so HM The Queen must be sooo small,” someone else tweeted.

Queen Elizabeth and Liz Truss "kissing hands"

A number of online sources claimed that Liz Truss is 5 ft 3 in tall, which is 160 cm. According to reports, the Queen is also 5 ft 3 in. Other reports say the new prime minister is 5 ft 7 in, which makes a bit more sense, although we don’t know for sure.

On Twitter, many people were speculating that the monarch has shrunk a bit since she was last measured, which is a normal process of ageing. Perhaps she has lost a few inches, and Liz Truss was wearing some high nude stiletto heels in the photos, giving her some added height. If these measurements are correct and the Queen now stands at about 5 ft tall, that means she is very tiny, but Liz certainly isn’t freakishly tall. The most logical answer is that the stark height difference is all due to camera angles, with Liz appearing closer to the camera and Elizabeth standing further back.

Unleashing nuclear weapons

Liz Truss: "I'm ready to unleash nuclear weapons" (3:15 to 3:50)

Liz Truss tells journalist John Pienaar: "I'm ready to unleash nuclear weapons"

The Queen's last official act was to appoint Liz Truss as new Prime Minister, a decision with its own potentially worrisome nuclear implications. In a video, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reminds us that at a hustings in August during the 2022 Tory leadership campaign, when asked by moderator John Pienaar whether she was prepared to unleash Britain's nuclear weapons and threaten global annihilation, Liz Truss replied:

"I think it's an important duty of the Prime Minister. I'm ready to do that.

The threat of nuclear war has been rising since Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, heightening tensions among neighbouring NATO member states.

Earlier this year, the Kremlin said Russia had been placed on nuclear alert after “unacceptable” comments by Liz Truss. It was not made clear what comments exactly Kremlin officials had taken offence to.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at the time:

“Statements by various representatives at various levels about possible conflict situations and even collisions and clashes between NATO and the Russian Federation.

"We consider such statements absolutely unacceptable.

“I will not name the authors of these statements, although it was the British foreign secretary."

Task Force Europe

On 19 December 2021, Liz Truss was appointed Chief Negotiator of Task Force Europe following Lord Frost's resignation.

Leading the World

On 13 February 2022, Mike Small wrote an article entitled "Leading the World" in Bella Caledonia, which began:

Self-doubt, like guilt, are useful emotions. They can be crippling but like everything in moderation they can be essential correctives too: ‘Can I do this?’ ‘Should I do this?’ ‘Should I have done that?’ Sadly Liz Truss seemed to have not a shred of self-doubt not a moment of Imposter-Syndrome as she arrived in Moscow representing us, however improbably, as Foreign Secretary.

Wanton uselessness

While the Cabinet is riddled with truly ghastly bastards, awful sick people, none of them exude the sort of wanton uselessness of Truss who arrived into a scene of international crisis-diplomacy looking like a child waiting for someone to collect her from Lost and Found. She was completely unprepared, had no message, her tone and body-language were pitiful and she talked over the translators before blundering in basic Russian geography.

Left at the podium

Left at the Moscow podium like a jilted bride

Sergey Lavrov left her at the podium like a jilted bride. There is the possibility that this was an expensive joke but Truss’s botched trip certainly made things worse in a situation of very high stakes. Ben Wallace was sent the next day to try and fix her mess.

Dunning-Kruger effect

On 20 September 2022, Craig Smith posted on Facebook:

Liz Truss is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect!

Premiership

Full article: Premiership of Liz Truss

Deselection in 2009?

On 16 November 2009, the Independent reported:

David Cameron faces a major challenge to his authority today as local Conservative Party activists meet to decide whether to sack a woman candidate, whom he had favoured, because she once had an extra-marital affair.

The battle raging inside the South West Norfolk Conservative Association between those who are for or against their new parliamentary candidate, Elizabeth Truss, is the most visible symptom of a power struggle between local activists – dubbed the "Turnip Taliban" – and Mr Cameron's "Notting Hill set".

The woman at the centre of it, a 34-year-old councillor from Greenwich, in south-east London, is exactly the type of candidate Mr Cameron wants to enlist to modernise the public image of the Conservative Party.

The product of a comprehensive school, who won a place at Oxford University, she is deputy director of the London think tank Reform, worked for big-name companies before turning to politics, and is a media-friendly woman in a notoriously male-dominated party.

By the end of today, she will either be a high-flyer with golden prospects of promotion in a Cameron-led government, or her political career will have taken a nose dive because she once strayed from the straight and narrow.

The fact that Ms Truss had had an affair with the Tory MP Mark Field when they were both married to others was well known in Westminster. Details could be found on the internet. But, as neither Ms Truss nor Mr Field were from the area, the news had not reached most members of the Norfolk South West constituency party, who found out from a Sunday newspaper the day after they had chosen Ms Truss as their parliamentary candidate.

Mr Cameron's personal authority is on the line because he has not only praised and supported Ms Truss in public but it was even revealed that he had rung a senior member of the local association, Sir Jeremy Bagge, in an attempt – albeit in vain – to enlist his support and prevent Ms Truss facing deselection.

Sir Jeremy, a former high sheriff of Norfolk, who owns a 1,200-acre estate and knows the Royal Family socially, told BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend:

"I have absolutely nothing against her as an individual. I voted for her and what she got up to four years ago doesn't concern me. What concerns me is Conservative Central Office, the headquarters, failed to actually advise us that we could be subjected to embarrassment, which we have been subjected to."

Sir Jeremy said that when concerns were raised that Ms Truss had not mentioned her affair in her selection interview, the national party responded that the panel could have found out about it by putting her name into Google. "I get seriously upset with regard to their general arrogance," he said. "In my view it is deceit. They have betrayed us as an association and they have also betrayed Ms Truss as a candidate."

The association's chairman, David Hills, who initially sought Ms Truss's deselection, is now understood to have thrown his support behind her. Party officials are reported to have threatened the local association that they would have an all-women shortlist imposed on them at their next selection if they removed Ms Truss.

In a departure from normal procedure, local party members were not told who was on their shortlist before the selection meeting on 24 October, so they had no chance to research the candidates' backgrounds. Ms Truss easily won the selection on the strength of her performance on the day.

It is also rumoured that party staff had arranged that, at the meeting, the candidates would be asked whether there was anything in their private lives that should be told, in order to give Ms Truss the opportunity to clear the air, but that the person who was supposed to ask the question did not do so.

In 2005, Ms Truss was chosen to fight Labour-held Calder Valley as a last-minute replacement for Sue Catling, who was accused of having an illicit affair with a fellow Tory. She probably would not have been selected if the Calder Valley party had known about her affair with Mark Field, which had not then become public.

The row is just one symptom of the friction within the Conservative Party, as Mr Cameron's determination to use the selection procedure to modernise the party comes up against the cherished independence of local associations. A public row erupted last month when the party chairman, Eric Pickles, was accused of trying to intervene in the selection procedure in Congleton, Cheshire, where the Tory MP, Sir Nicholas Winterton, is stepping down after 29 years. It is alleged that he tried to have the shortlist lengthened to include Matt Hancock, who is chief of staff for the shadow Chancellor, George Osborne.

Mr Cameron came close to provoking a major rebellion in the shires last month when he told a Commons committee that, from January, the party would introduce all-women shortlists in some constituencies to increase the number of women MPs. His words were a reaction to the fact that the previous eight candidates chosen in winnable Tory seats were all male, and that male Tory candidates outnumber women by more than two to one.

The Labour Party introduced all-women shortlists 14 years ago but the idea has been bitterly opposed in Conservative circles, not least by eminent women Tory MPs such as Ann Widdecombe and Nadine Dorries.

It has long been alleged that rural Conservative Associations are full of people who do not think women should be in Parliament at all, but expect to get two for the price of one when they select a male MP with a wife who is prepared to help out in the constituency, and that they are doubly horrified by the sight of a professional woman who has admitted to having an extra-marital affair. Another accusation is that Tories in rural seats do not trust candidates from the metropolis.

Ms Truss's marriage to Hugh O'Leary, a finance director, survived the affair and, she says, became stronger. They have two children.

Mark Field's position as an MP has not been affected by the revelation of his affair with Elizabeth Truss, although in 2006 his marriage broke up and, in the same year, his hopes of being a government minister faded. The son of an Army officer, he entered Parliament as MP for the City of London and Westminster in 2001, at the same time as David Cameron and George Osborne, and kept pace with them by being promoted to the Tory front bench as shadow minister for culture after only two years.

But he did not get on with David Cameron as party leader and he was dropped in 2006. He has been a backbench MP since. His affair with Ms Truss began in 2004 and lasted several months. His first marriage ended in divorce in 2006. He has since married the celebrity agent Victoria Elphicke.

 

Appointments by Liz Truss

Appointee	Job	Appointed	End	Description
Kemi Badenoch	UK/International Trade Secretary	6 September 2022	7 February 2023
Suella Braverman	Home Secretary	6 September 2022	19 October 2022
James Cleverly	UK/Foreign Secretary	6 September 2022	13 November 2023
Thérèse Coffey	United Kingdom/Deputy Prime Minister	6 September 2022	25 October 2022
Thérèse Coffey	Secretary of State for Health	6 September 2022	25 October 2022
Jeremy Hunt	Chancellor of the Exchequer	14 October 2022	5 July 2024
Dominic Johnson	Minister of State for International Trade and the Cabinet Office	2 October 2022
Kwasi Kwarteng	Chancellor of the Exchequer	6 September 2022	14 October 2022
Kit Malthouse	UK/Minister/Education	6 September 2022	25 October 2022
Penny Mordaunt	Leader of the House of Commons, Lord President of the Council	6 September 2022
Neil O'Brien	Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Primary Care and Public Health	8 September 2022
Jacob Rees-Mogg	Secretary of State for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy	6 September 2022	25 October 2022
Grant Shapps	Home Secretary	19 October 2022	25 October 2022
Tom Tugendhat	Minister of State for Security	6 September 2022		Suggested that COVID vaccination could be mandated for UK workers
Alex Wild	Downing Street Press Secretary	September 2022	October 2022
Nadhim Zahawi	Minister for Women and Equalities	6 September 2022	25 October 2022
Nadhim Zahawi	Minister for Intergovernmental Relations	6 September 2022	25 October 2022
Nadhim Zahawi	Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster	6 September 2022	25 October 2022

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Munich Security Conference/2022	18 February 2022	20 February 2022	Germany Munich Bavaria	Slightly less than 1/3 of the 664 of the participants have pages here
UK/Parliament/Voted YES to vaccine passports in 2021			UK/House of Commons	These members of the UK Parliament voted YES to the introduction of a "vaccine" passport in 2021

 

Related Documents

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