Friday 2 September 2022 10:52 PM Teachers, relatives and old friends reveal what makes Liz Truss underestimated trends now

When she was ten, the elfin-faced schoolgirl decided she wanted to be a politician. By the time she was 18 she was telling her Oxford University student friends that what she really wanted was to be Prime Minister.

Back then her dream was to be Britain’s second female PM. History, of course, was to intervene to thwart one of those ambitions when Theresa May became the first woman premier after Margaret Thatcher. But this weekend Liz Truss is tantalisingly close to acquiring the keys to No 10 and becoming the third.

As the Tory leadership election votes are counted in what has turned into a bitter, divisive and often acrimonious battle between her and former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, Miss Truss and her ‘transition’ team are hunkered down at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s official residence in Kent.

There they are putting the finishing touches to a Cabinet line-up that she hopes will not just end the government paralysis which has existed since Boris Johnson was forced from office, but also transform the fortunes of a country facing the greatest cost of living crisis in 50 years.

It is by any measure a staggering challenge. Her in-tray, should she walk across the Downing Street threshold on Tuesday afternoon, is the most daunting any incoming PM has faced, from soaring inflation and the prospect of strikes across every stripe of the public sector, to an energy crisis not known since the dark days of the 1970s.

What makes it all the more extraordinary is that when this process to choose a successor to Boris Johnson began, Miss Truss was by no means the favourite and uncertain even of a place on the two-person ballot paper sent out to party members.

But if there is anything her internal Conservative enemies — and they include some significant ‘big beasts’ — as well as Keir Starmer’s Labour Opposition should learn and learn quickly it is that the woman born Mary Elizabeth Truss will be no pushover.

That childhood aspiration has not diminished and is now matched by a steely ambition that recognises merely becoming Prime Minister is not in itself the greatest prize. It is as one of her oldest friends says, ‘doing something with it’.

Explains her friend: ‘She will want to leave the country in a better place when she leaves than it is when she comes in.’ A noble enough goal, if not an original one. The question is, of course, is it achievable?

The answer to that may lie in an upbringing which was as radically different as that of Johnson, May, David Cameron and, yes, even of her political heroine Mrs Thatcher, as it was possible to be.

For Liz Truss was not a born Tory. Her family roots are on the progressive Left and she was brought up in a house of Lib Dem-voting, Guardian-reading activism where a weekend not marching for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or holding hands with the anti-Cruise missile women of Greenham Common, was a weekend wasted.

Should she triumph in this uniquely Conservative vote, her political journey from the suburbs of Leeds, via Paisley close to the River Clyde, where for a while her speech acquired a raw Glasgow twang, will be the most remarkable of any recent party leader.

Tony Blair was famously the son of a Conservative-voting father, but as a young man he was always steeped in Labour politics.

In the Truss household there was no compromising on fashionable Left-leaning causes and it was hardly surprising that her exposure to agit-prop dogma drew her first to the sandal-wearing, placard-bearing Liberal Democrats, the perennial party of protest.

It is a journey, though, that has not been without cost with family friction at the heart of it.

Over the past weeks as Truss and Sunak have debated up and down the country, the Mail has been conducting an investigation into what it is that has turned a woman, who even those close to her say has the monotone of the speaking clock, into such a resounding favourite.

We have spoken to family, friends, foes and even former romantic partners. They all agree on one thing: the Liz Truss they know is brighter and far more intelligent than some of her leaden appearances on hustings and in interviews might have suggested.

There is, too, something of a chameleon character to her that manages to identify her with practically everyone. That, of course, may be her skill as a politician — she is after all the longest-serving Cabinet minister in recent times.

But as a one-time ally says: ‘The key to understanding her is that she actually says what she believes.’ What perhaps is even more bizarre is the contempt she has these days for liberal group-think.

All the same it is scarcely a surprise that the cost of the recasting of her politics not only triggered soul-searching in the tight-knit Truss family but also anguish.

Yesterday’s Times newspaper reported his daughter’s rise to the brink of the Tory leadership has left her academic father John, emeritus professor of pure mathematics at Leeds University, ‘so upset he can barely talk about it’.

Another report claimed Professor Truss was ‘so appalled’ by his child’s ‘conversion to extreme Right-wing politics’ that it had impacted their relationship.

We understand that this is considerably wide of the mark. It may be coincidence but we understand Prof Truss has spent part of the time that his daughter has been campaigning abroad in Finland.

‘I think it’s fair to say there is a diplomatic element to this,’ says a source. Family figures have indicated to us that the move was almost certainly to avoid being a distraction to his daughter.

But if he has been dismayed by her transformation from the spirited girl in whom he proudly instilled a strong social conscience into the standard bearer for the Tory Right, he is not saying.

All the same it is worth noting Prof Truss, whose colleagues at Leeds have been ordered not to give interviews about him, declined to campaign for his daughter when she first stood for election in 2001. (Again it may be a coincidence but she was standing in a strongly Labour-supporting constituency.) An indication of how this must have been testing family bonds comes from Prof Truss’s older brother Richard, a retired Church of England vicar who officiated when his niece married accountant, Hugh O’Leary, 22 years ago.

The Truss family, he said, had liberalism ‘in its blood’ adding: ‘It must still be in her blood as well.’

He last saw his niece in March at a party to mark his 80th birthday.

He was, he says, ‘touched’ that the Foreign Secretary had flown in from overseas in order to be there. Of the family politics, he explained: ‘My grandfather lived and died quite young but he used to turn up and campaign for the Liberals before the First World War, so it’s kind of in our genes.’

His understanding of liberal, he says, is of being ‘open and concerned for those who are in need’.

It is also why he hopes the girl he remembers as ‘fun, very bright… questioning and determined’ will do something to heal ‘the division between people in poverty’ as well as changing the Government’s approach to immigration and refugees. ‘I hope she might do something on both fronts,’ he says.

Paradoxically for all this apparent family dissent, there is also considerable support for a politician whose list of jobs in government reads like a cut-out-and-keep guide to becoming PM: Under-secretary of state for childcare and education; Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary; Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor; Chief Secretary to the Treasury, International Trade Secretary; and finally heading the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Her three brothers, Chris, Patrick and Francis, turned out to support her at the final hustings at Wembley on Wednesday evening. As for her mother Priscilla, she has been a near constant presence as her daughter has criss-crossed the country seeking support.

‘For the children, Priscilla has always been there for them,’ says a family friend. ‘They always knew that if they needed her she would be there.

‘The fact is Liz is proud of her politics but she is also proud of her mother’s political views, too.’

Another sign of those chameleon qualities? Or simply an indication of that old truism that blood is thicker than water?

Certainly Liz Truss was not just shaped by her father’s politics; her mother’s were equally important, perhaps more so. If anything, it is from her mother’s side of the family that we find the crucible of Liz Truss’s convictions.

The roots of the Grasby family, Priscilla’s maiden name, are deep in the rural landscape around Driffield, East Yorkshire. Priscilla’s grandfather George fought in the Great War with the East Yorkshire regiment and lost a leg at the Battle of Passchendaele.

After the war, he married Mary and became a cobbler on Adelphi Street. Mike Kennie, who lived next door, said the old soldier’s disability was no handicap and that he would ‘often be climbing ladders outside the building.’

His father William was a shepherd and inn keeper. Today the pub he ran, The Ship Inn at Langtoft, is still in business. But the link came as a shock to the current publican Martin Weaver.

‘Can you repeat that? Liz Truss, our probable next Prime Minister, is

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