How Busy Lizzie has turned from party joke to darling of 58 deals
Move over ‘Dishi Rishi’, the Tory faithful have a new pin-up – ‘ Busy Lizzie’. International Trade Secretary Liz Truss has achieved the seemingly impossible: a few weeks ago she overtook Chancellor Rishi Sunak in a Cabinet popularity poll conducted by the influential ConservativeHome website.
It marks an astonishing turnaround in her political fortunes.
Much mocked for a cringe-making 2014 Tory party conference speech about cheese imports – so bad that the clip went viral on social media – she was humiliatingly demoted from the position of Lord Chancellor by Theresa May in 2017 for failing to defend judges after a controversial Brexit ruling.
And as a Remainer, her Cabinet future looked bleak when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister last year.
eight months earlier, in an interview with me, she had ridiculed him as lazy, saying that while Mrs May ‘worked like a Trojan’, classics scholar Johnson merely ‘studied the Trojans’.
When Mr Johnson forgave her and handed her the high-profile task of negotiating noneU post-Brexit trade deals, many Tory MPs said he was a fool.
She was out of her depth and got the job only because he needed more women in the Cabinet – not because she was talented, they muttered.
In recent months, however, she has been busy making them eat their words by signing trade deals with 58 non- eU countries.
Barely a week goes past without a photograph of Miss Truss’s beaming face, framed by the Union flag, shaking hands with the trade minister of yet another nation.
In the last week alone she’s clinched deals with vietnam, Singapore and Mexico; a month ago Japan signed on the dotted line. Miss Truss, 45, boasted of that success during an episode of The Great British Bake off when she tweeted that contestants ‘used a lot of soy sauce’ and it was ‘a good thing it will be made cheaper’ by the deal she had negotiated with Tokyo. But beneath the cheeky self-promotion on social media, there is a robust and radical Tory thinker.
Take her comments yesterday in her other Cabinet role as women and equalities minister. Successive administrations had concentrated on ‘fashionable’ race, gender and sexuality issues at the expense of more important ‘equality’ issues such as poverty or the North/South divide, she said.
In a speech titled The New Fight For Fairness, she criticised the dominance of ‘identity politics and loud lobby groups’.
Less attention should be given to ‘quotas, targets, unconscious bias training and diversity statements’, she argued, and more to giving people greater control over their own lives. There are few people better placed to lead the growing backlash against trendy ‘ woke’ attitudes. Left- wingers cannot dismiss Miss Truss as a ‘privileged Tory’ who knows nothing about real life.
She went to primary school in Paisley, Scotland, one of the most deprived areas in Britain, followed by a Leeds comprehensive where she did double maths A-levels. Her father, a professor of mathematics, was so Left- wing he refused to campaign for her when she stood for the Tories.
At oxford, she was a Lib Dem and called for the monarchy to be scrapped.
Within two years of becoming an MP in 2010, Truss was education minister and launching a campaign to revive learning times tables by rote in schools.
When she was Chief Secretary to the Treasury she infuriated stuffy officials by asking them to do complex sums – 46x33 for example – off the top of their heads.
(They should have turned the tables on her. I once asked her what 7x8 was. She replied: ‘54’ and burst out laughing when she realised her howler.)
TRUSS, who has two children with finance director husband Hugh, has never shied away from speaking out. In 2012 she coauthored a book which said British workers were among ‘the worst idlers in the world’.
And she makes the average rhino look thin-skinned even when highprofile speeches – that ‘ cheese’ speech for example – fall flat.
one of her friends said to me at the time: ‘Liz is great, but she can’t be leader when her speeches are like cold porridge.’
But she has rebuilt her reputation as International Trade Secretary with trade deals worth more than £200billion, equal to most of Britain’s non-eU trade.
Some are so- called ‘ rollover’ agreements and replicate agreements the UK already had by virtue of being an eU member. But not all. Many Remain campaigners warned it would be years before we got deals of any kind.
There were reports yesterday that the US might sign a ‘ mini trade deal’ with the UK before Donald Trump steps down as President in January.
If so, it will be another feather of the cap of ‘Busy Lizzie’, the ultimate Tory comeback kid.