I’d love to be Chancellor ... but I don’t want success just because I’ve got a pair of boobs
Hammond’s No 2 backs May deal, saying we can change it after we leave EU anyway
Heaven help any male number-crunchers at the Treasury who question Chief Secretary Liz Truss’s sums. She did double maths a-level and is the first female Conservative to hold the post of Treasury Chief Secretary, which means she’s effectively the Deputy Chancellor.
Truss, 43, speaks with a bluntness you might expect from someone who went to primary school in Paisley, Scotland, one of the poorest areas in Britain, and then to a comprehensive in Leeds.
When she says she is ‘not a natural Tory’, it is an understatement.
Her father John, a maths professor, is an anti-Brexiteer who supports the Green Party; her Bolton-born mother Priscilla is pro-CnD and pro-Brexit.
as an eight-year-old, Truss joined them on Ban the Bomb marches as well as playing Maggie Thatcher in a school debate during the 1983 election. at Oxford University she became a Lib Dem activist demanding an end to the monarchy.
So no, this was not the natural path for someone who, after a career in the City, became Conservative MP for South West norfolk in 2010.
Even once she’d established her Tory credentials, her rise through the party’s ranks came shuddering to a halt when she was demoted from Lord Chancellor in 2016 after judges savaged her for failing to back them over a Brexit ruling on the triggering of article 50.
The episode left her badly shaken and she went away to lick her wounds.
But she has reinvented herself, using Instagram and Twitter to develop a new social media savvy Tory profile.
and judging by her performance this week as presenter of The Spectator magazine’s parliamentary awards, she has recovered her bounce. She brought the house down in a self-deprecatory speech, reeling off joke after risque joke about her Cabinet colleagues and sending up her party, torn apart as it is by Brexit, as ‘just one big happy family’.
When we meet over a coffee in Westminster, she says immediately: ‘I feel I’ve come home at the Treasury.’
Her accent is somewhat discordant – part Glasgow, part Leeds, part Oxford and with a modern, Kiwi- style rising inflection at the end of each sentence. The tone is reminiscent of another precocious Yorkshire Thatcherite, William Hague.
Britain
has had two female Prime Ministers, but no female Chancellor, she points out. ‘Economics and finance is the final frontier for women; it’s the last thing they will conquer because controlling finance is at the heart of everything in government,’ she says.
It’s clear this is a frontier she intends to cross.
‘I’d love the job of Chancellor one day,’ she says, while denying reports of a rift with the current incumbent Philip Hammond: ‘We have a lot of banter. When I introduced him to my husband, Philip said “I’m only Liz’s boss in the loosest sense of the word”.’
Truss and her husband, accountant Hugh O’Leary, have two daughters. So which one controls the purse strings at home?
‘We have a joint account – it’s a power-sharing arrangement!’
as the Treasury minister responsible for keeping a lid on ministers’ budgets, Truss has benefited from her clash with the judges – it has stiffened her resolve to stand up to her mostly male Cabinet colleagues.
This summer she made an outspoken attack on ministers who she thought were demanding too much for their departments, saying it was ‘not macho’ to push for bigger budgets. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson was so incensed by her intransigence that he threatened to close an raF base in her constituency.
She also took a swipe at Michael Gove over the Environment Secretary’s planned crackdown on wood-burning stoves to stem pollution, calling them ‘wood-burning Goves’ and making jokes about the ‘hot air and smoke at the Environment Department’.
She does not take kindly to being patronised by men. ‘I hate being called feisty, bubbly and bossy, words always attributed to women,’ she says. ‘Chris Grayling has never been described as feisty,’ she grins. ‘Or bubbly,’ I observe. ‘When men call women ambitious they mean pushy,’ she adds.
abrasive and irreverent she may be, but Truss is no #MeToo militant. ‘I’m a protagonist. I get stuff thrown at me, but enjoy the fight,’ she says. ‘People say you shouldn’t be offensive to women, blah, blah, blah. But if women want true equality you have to take offensive comments sometimes.
‘The most offensive thing is not being listened to.
‘We need more women MPs, but they must be prepared to take a bit of flak. I don’t want to be there just because I’ve got a pair of boobs. I want to be there because of my ideas and what I have to say. Identity politics can go too far.’ S he
says the hostile male reaction to her sense of humour is double standards. ‘When I’m cheeky, people ask, “are you really trying to be funny?” The answer is yes, I like a laugh.’ Truss campaigned for remain but supports Theresa May’s Brexit deal: ‘ People have written her obituary before but she’s always the last person standing. She’ll get it through.’
She has nothing but contempt for Boris Johnson’s antics. While Mrs May ‘worked like a Trojan’ to get an EU deal, Classics scholar Johnson merely ‘studied the Trojans’.
Truss suggests, surprisingly, that once the UK has left the EU it could ignore parts of the deal it doesn’t like. ‘We can do what we want. Some things are set in treaties but no parliament can bind its successor.’ ‘We can just rip it all up?’ I ask. ‘We can renegotiate,’ she replies. Brussels may have other ideas. She says Brexit is a chance to tackle the parts of Britain that have become ‘furred up’.
‘We’ve had 40 years of people blaming EU red tape. Those excuses are now gone,’ she says.
‘But we’ll have to take on vested interests; nimbys who don’t want homes next to them, lawyers who launch judicial reviews on everything.’ She clearly hasn’t forgotten what the men in wigs did to her.
She warns against abandoning Conservative principles, saying the Tories must not become ‘Labour lite’ and copy high-tax-and-spend Jeremy Corbyn.
‘He wants everyone to live in a commune,’ she says. ‘I became a Tory because I hated being told what to do and kept in my place by government. We must offer low taxes and show that earning and making money is a good thing.’
I feel myself falling into an elephant sized #MeToo trap when I comment on Truss’s outfit in small talk as she leaves.
‘They’re tangerine culottes, I wore them specially,’ she says sarcastically, making me squirm ... and proving that Liz Truss always wears the trousers.