Liz Truss is the Tory radical Britain needs

The Foreign Secretary has evolved into a bold, fearless reformer who appreciates the need for change

That Russian state TV devoted a whole programme to condemning her is a sign she is doing a good job

Of the remaining two candidates for prime minister, I’ve long admired Rishi Sunak, but it’s Liz Truss who deserves the job. That the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov despises her is a badge of honour. That the posher sort of Conservative wrinkles their nose at her earnestness only encourages me. That quite a lot of women scoff at her voice and clothes just annoys me.

She’s funny, clever, determined and experienced. She’s been a minister for 12 years, eight of them in the Cabinet.

But what I especially like about Truss is her trajectory. Despite coming from a household that was “left of Labour”, she became a Lib Dem at Oxford. Then, realising her mistake, she became a Conservative in an unfashionable year to be doing so – 1996.

When she joined the Cabinet at the age of 38, she was cautious, made a few mistakes and gave a clumsy speech about cheese that some of her critics like to cite.

Then in the mid-2010s she reinvented herself as a passionate champion of free enterprise unafraid to take on The Blob. She started a think tank to develop ideas. She consulted me a few times when she was undergoing this reinvention and I watched as she became bolder and clearer in her thinking.

Mostly if you suggest something punchy for a politician’s speech, they tone it down. Truss does the opposite and makes it punchier. She is unafraid.

It is one of the paradoxes of this leadership election that Brexiteers are backing a reluctant Remain supporter such as Liz Truss, while Remainers are keen on a cautious Brexit supporter like Rishi Sunak. The zeal of the apostate can be a powerful thing.

As secretary of state for international trade, Truss was a star. The trade agreements came thick and fast. No, these were not just cut-andpaste treaties: they were as bold as she could make them – and a lot bolder than many of her critics in the media and the Civil Service wanted.

As Foreign Secretary, meanwhile, she has not only not put a foot wrong, but has led the West’s charge against Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine from the front. That Russian state television devoted an entire programme to condemning her is a sign she is doing a good job.

So I see Truss’s journey from inexperienced coalition junior minister to tough and successful Foreign Secretary as evidence of her growing into the job.

Above all she really appreciates the economic emergency facing Britain: a decade of sluggish growth must come to an end or we face a ruinous 2020s. That means bold supply-side reforms to tax, regulation, subsidy and spending. She knows the vital importance of innovation.

There’s only one issue about which her views concern me, and that’s Net Zero. She has said little about it. Our unilateral embrace of a dogmatic target date for balanced carbon dioxide emissions is madness. It has driven up energy bills and will do so further. None of the candidates in this contest has seemed to appreciate the scale of the energy shock facing us this winter.

Net Zero is hurting the poor, especially in the chillier North, and rewarding the rich. It is causing serious environmental harm – the burning of wood in power stations, the planting of open land with alien conifers, the littering of the North Sea with concrete wind farm foundations.

Wind supplied 4 per cent of our total energy in 2020 and intermittently. It cannot be the answer, however hard we puff it up.

The aspiration to reduce emissions is right, but there is a better way to get there: encouraging innovation in fission, fusion, shale gas and carbon capture rather than forcing today’s thermodynamically inadequate renewable energy systems on us and further ruining our competitive edge.