From child of radicals to the door of No 10...
IT WAS the moment when the young Liz Truss became, in her words, ‘radicalised’.
As a child, the Foreign Secretary was infuriated to be presented with a ‘Junior Air Hostess’ badge when she boarded a KLM flight with her parents – while her three brothers received ‘Junior Pilot Badges’.
‘I just thought, “Don’t tell me what I can do or what I can’t do”,’ the potential next Prime Minister recalls. It was a formative moment in a childhood that had seen the Truss family move to Scotland when Liz was four.
She was enrolled in West Primary School in Paisley before her academic father’s teaching posts saw them up sticks again to settle in Leeds and Canada.
John Truss and his wife Priscilla were both Left-wingers who took their daughter on CND marches. After a brief flirtation with the Liberal Democrats, Ms Truss moved to the Right after encountering Conservative students at Oxford.
Her political journey took her from chanting ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out’ as a child to addressing the Tory Party conference in 1997 with Mrs Thatcher in the audience.
Ms Truss is pictured here aged 12 during a year at school in Canada, before returning to study at Roundhay comprehensive in Leeds. A source close to the family said: ‘Liz had a vibrant, character-forming childhood.
‘With three older brothers, she had to fight for everything. It was a very solid, lower middle-class upbringing, with loads of friends on free school meals. It was a warm and supportive environment to grow up in.’
Ms Truss, 46, cites the ‘air hostess’ moment when she discusses what she calls the ‘cult of female exceptionalism’. She once said: ‘Mrs Thatcher did not consider women to be the equal of men, but their superior...
‘I don’t normally disagree with Mrs Thatcher but I do on this occasion. Because it’s important we reject the idea women are superior... or make better bosses.
‘It’s just as bad as the cult of male exceptionalism: the idea men are more decisive, mentally stronger or better leaders.’