She has pulled off post-Brexit trade deals worth £900billion. Now Liz Truss lets rip

AS LIZ TRUSS stands in Ian Fleming’s old quarters in Whitehall, surveying the sweeping view across Horse Guards and Downing Street, her stance seems to say: The World Is Not Enough. The International Trade Secretary has moved in to Room 39 in the Old Admiralty Building, where James Bond’s creator commanded a unit of Naval intelligence commandos during the Second World War – and met the real-life inspirations for Bond, M and Q.

Now the imposing building, which was also home to Winston Churchill during the First World War, is becoming the centre of operations for Ms Truss’s trade negotiations, with 2,000 specialist civil servants joining her as she ramps up the pace of her global deal-making.

Since Brexit, she has signed agreements covering 67 countries and the European Union, worth a total of £900 billion, with megadeals about to be struck with India, Australia and the main Asian Pacific countries.

Despite being routinely tipped for the sack during years of r e s huffl e s peculati o n – a nd mocked for her robotic party conference speeches and self- promoting social media activity – Ms Truss now regularly tops popularity polls of Ministers voted for by party members, as she reaps the benefits of being so closely identified with Britain’s independent, free-trading future.

It is testimony to her apparent political indestructability – a quality she shares with Boris Johnson.

The 45- year- old is a popular figure in Westminster, offsetting her ambition with playfulness and an impatience with ‘wokery’ and political correctness. During a discussion about ‘sexism’ in politics, I ask her how she reacts if a man wolf-whistles her in the street. ‘It depends who it is,’ she replies disarmingly.

Her background as a Leeds- born, comprehensive-educated Tory from a Left- wing, CND- marching family makes her the perfect Minister to address the ‘ shattering’ collapse of Labour’s vote in the North in Thursday’s local elections and the Hartlepool by-election.

Twisting the knife into Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, Ms Truss professes to be concerned that the party has become so weak that it no longer fulfils the constitutional necessity of a ‘strong opposition’.

‘Fundamentally, people are completely fed up with the Labour Party,’ she says. ‘They are fed up with the pessimism which often comes across as, “I don’t really like Britain very much”.

‘I grew up in the North of England and at the time it seemed natural that there would be a Labour council, most seats would have Labour MPs – that is what people did.

‘It’s been a long time coming but even in the 2000s under Tony Blair, support was shifting away from Labour, particularly in rural parts of the North.

‘So, we started to gain seats in the 2005 election and the 2010 election and, of course, I think that’s been accelerated by the Brexit referendum, but also by Boris’s personal attitude and positivity.’

What is the appeal to disadvantaged, ‘left-behind’ areas of a privi

You can see from walkabouts ...the public just really like what Boris is doing

leged Old Etonian Prime Minister who has faced endless headlines over buying £ 850 rolls of wallpaper for his Downing Street flat?

‘You can see from the walkabouts that he did in Hartlepool and the response from the public, they just really like what he’s doing,’ she says, dismissing Wallpapergate as a ‘Westminster village’ issue.

‘He has that appeal to talk to everybody across the country and connect with them on a human level and that is what people have responded to in this election.’

She adds: ‘On the doorsteps, from people I was speaking to, their focus was on how we are doing in terms of a vaccine rollout, how we’re doing on recovering from Covid, what are the future prospects for their town or their child.

‘That is what people are focused on. We’re opening up the economy but things have changed. We use technology much more than we did a year ago, we’ve got better ways of communicating, people are working differently, they are working more flexibly.

‘What the Prime Minister has done i s shown t hat we can bring new investment to the North... there is a positive alternative.’

She also tries to draw a line under Dominic Cummings’s role in causing political trouble for Mr Johnson over the decorations. She says the former No 10 aide ‘delivered many things for the Conservative Party; he did a great job at the Department for Education when he was working for Michael Gove, he did a great job of helping us deliver Brexit – but the world has moved on’.

Ms Truss, who was promoted to the Cabinet in 2014 as Environment Secretary within only four years of entering the Commons as the MP for South West Norfolk, has also served as Justice Secretary and Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

She still fizzes with enthusiasm for her job: aides claim that the number of deals signed make her ‘one of the most prolific trade secretaries in history, of any country’.

She is keen to stress the link between post- Brexit, post- Covid trading opportunities and Boris’s ‘levelling up’ agenda to spread the prosperity around the country.

‘Recently I visited a gin producer in Yorkshire and they had a whole load of crates of gin destined for Australia, and they understand that when we get that trade deal with Australia they will no longer be paying tariffs on that gin.

‘They understand that what that trade deal will deliver is more opportunities for their business.

‘Likewise, I visited a Yorkshire beef farm and again they are looking at exporting to the US market.

‘By 2030, two-thirds of the world’s middle class is going to be in Asia, and we sell the kinds of goods – whether it’s high-end cars, whether it’s whisky, whether it’s computer games – those people want to buy.

‘ The trade barriers have been high and we are now getting those barriers removed. The businesses and enterprises around Britain really understand that.’

She is less keen to dwell on the trade talks with Washington, which have been disrupted by the transition from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in the White House.

After five negotiating rounds, Ms Truss’s opposite number Katherine Tai is ‘reviewing’ the current state of the deal. Her negotiating team are expecting ‘more clarity’ when President Biden comes to the UK for the G7 in June.

The rollout of vaccines round the globe mean Ms Truss will be doing less negotiating by Zoom, and hopping on more planes – to the chagrin of some of her family.

‘I have very demanding children and everywhere I go there has to be a present,’ says Ms Truss, who has two daughters, aged 12 and 14, with husband Hugh. ‘If I come back without a present, I’m pretty much not let in the house.

‘There’s been a lot of airport chocolate from Geneva.’

She believes that boom times are just around the corner, with Britain on the brink of a new ‘Roaring Twenties’.

‘We have seen some fantastic economic forecasts. I think the way that British business has adjusted to Covid has been incredible,’ she says. ‘In many areas, EU trade policy was defensive and not focused on opportunities, and I think we are able to be more and more nimble.

‘The British, the Union Jack is one of the most recognised symbols in the world, it is a sign of quality.

‘We know that it commands a premium in markets like the United States and Asia and I think we have been held back by being part of a bloc which sometimes looks at the downsides rather than the upsides.’

Does Ms Truss think the EU’s bitterness over Brexit and the success of the UK’s vaccine rollout is the reason for disruptions to trade over issues such as the export of British shellfish to EU countries and the import of fashion items?

‘I think that it was always the case that the EU didn’t want us to leave, that was clear,’ she says. ‘We now need to move to a grown-up relationship where we are trading partners in the same way that we are trading partners with the United States and we’re trading partners with Japan, and that’s the type of relationship we want to move to.

‘I think it’s in the EU’s interest to have that mindset.’

Ms Truss adds: ‘We were very clear that when Brexit took place there would be additional processes that businesses had to undertake. We were told there would be desperate scenes at Channel ports and it would all be a disaster.

‘ Those t ales of Armageddon haven’t happened.’

She indicates that she is unlikely to take a holiday in an EU country, given the uncertainty over her Government’s traffic-light list of travel restrictions.

‘I don’t know yet, but I’m busy interviewing with you rather than booking my flight to Portugal at the

The Tory Party is not identikit. We’re not all London lawyers

moment, aren’t I? So, I’ve probably missed out on that.’

Wolf-whistling aside, Ms Truss, who doubles as Minister for Women and Equalities, criticises media coverage of Mr Johnson’s fiancee Carrie Symonds, which has sometimes portrayed her as an ‘interfering’ presence in No 10.

Ms Truss says: ‘I am a great supporter of the free press, so I don’t ever say that the press shouldn’t print things.

‘ However, I would like to see women treated equally in the media as men. I prefer to see people treated on their merits rather than targeted because they are a particular gender.

‘I think politics has changed dramatically over the past few years. There are many more women in the House of Commons, there’s a different atmosphere in politics and I think also there’s a different generation in politics.

‘I think one great thing about the Conservative Party now is it’s much more widely drawn from across the country, we’ve got a much wider range of people from different professional backgrounds.

‘It’s not identikit, we’re not all London lawyers, which you might say there are quite a lot of those in the Labour Party.’

Ms Truss’s ebullient mood only darkens when she discusses last weekend’s series finale of her favourite television programme, Line Of Duty, which revealed bumbling Ian Buckles to be the sinister mastermind ‘H’.

‘I thought it was terrible, to be honest,’ she says. ‘I was expecting something a lot more seismic.’