Tuesday 6 September 2022 07:08 PM Liz Truss's husband watches proudly as his wife is crowned Britain's third ... trends now

Liz Truss' 'true blue' husband watched proudly as the Tory leader was crowned Britain's third female Prime Minister.

Hugh O'Leary listened on as Ms Truss delivered her first Downing Street address on Tuesday, vowing to to create an 'aspiration nation' during her reign as the nation's 56th Prime Minister.

The couple posed lovingly together outside the famous black door of No 10 after her speech, smiling and gazing at one another as cameras flashed.

They waved to the onlookers after Ms Truss addressed the nation and warned of a 'vital time for our country.' The newly instated PM also said she will deal 'hands on with the energy crisis caused by Putin's war.'

Mr O'Leary was also by her side when she won Tory leadership on Monday, marking the first high-profile joint appearance by a hitherto private couple.

Ms Truss, 47, described her 'dry-witted' accountant spouse as the 'love of my life' on Valentine’s Day three years ago. She met Mr O’Leary at the Tory Party Conference in 1997 and said of their first date: ‘I invited him ice skating and he sprained his ankle.’ 

Mr O’Leary was born in 1974 and grew up in Allerton, Liverpool, before his family moved to Heswall, Wirral.

A former neighbour said 'Hugh was much more serious' than his two younger siblings and that 'he was very earnest and very quiet but a lovely boy,' the Times reported last week.

O’Leary, 48, became a chartered accountant after studying econometrics and mathematical economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). 

The couple started dating and married three years later, settling in Greenwich, South-East London. They have two daughters, Frances and Liberty. O’Leary has worked from home as a house-husband.

A close family friend, cookery writer Mallika Basu, said: ‘They are a great team. Both are keen cooks and very good cooks. She does lovely roasts, he does a good curry.’

Only once has their relationship been rocked. In 2006, it was revealed Truss had been having an affair with married Tory MP Mark Field. Her marriage survived; his ended.

The only damaging moment came when Tory members in her Norfolk constituency complained they had been kept in the dark about the affair and tried to oust her. 

But they were defeated and Truss triumphed.

'I remember when the tabloid furore was roaring ... both times, her friends locally rallied around,' a source told The Times. 

'There were a number of occasions when the two of them came to various parties and it was quite good to see that people were sympathising and rallying round, particularly when it was over her selection in 2009. It was extremely unfair the way that came up.

'I don’t really know much about what went on but from my impression, they [O’Leary and Truss] have always been a really strong couple and I have never seen any real sign that it’s had much of an impact.'

The couple enjoy a very private marriage that would be thrust more centrally into the spotlight if she were to enter No10.

It comes after it was reported that Truss' left-wing academic father was apparently 'so saddened' at her metamorphosis from an anti-monarchist Lib Dem to a Tory that he finds it difficult to talk about it, according to reports. 

A former neighbour of maths professor John Truss claims he was 'sometimes furious' and could 'barely bring himself to speak about' her being a Conservative candidate when she first stood in 2005. 

His college, the University of Leeds, has also reportedly banned his colleagues from speaking about Truss as well, The Times reports. 

Truss has been quite open about her left wing background, revealing how she went on Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) marches. 

The woman touted to be the third female PM after fellow Conservative leaders, Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, recalls they would also chant 'Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out' while being at marches in front of the Faslane nuclear submarine base while she lived in Scotland. 

Truss has also recently said she regrets making comments about abolishing the Monarchy. 

The former neighbour also said that Truss' mother, nurse and teacher, Priscilla - who he spoke to before she was selected as a Tory candidate in 2005 - is backing her daughter.

'She said she was quite torn. She'd agonised over whether to support her because she was her daughter, or not to support her because she was a Tory,' he told The Times. 'In the end, she decided that family ties should win out.'

In July, the Daily Express also alleged that the Foreign Secretary's relationship with her father has been impacted by her 'conversion to extreme right-wing politics' and he is really 'appalled' by it, a colleague said.

Another university source said: 'John is distraught at the policies his daughter is advocating in her bid to become PM.'

But Truss has repeatedly disavowed her former left wing views and called a speech she gave advocating for the abolition of the Monarchy a 'mistake' after a clip resurfaced of her at the Lib Dem conference in 1994.

The Conservative leadership candidate told reporters in Peterborough in July that she regretted the remarks which took aim at the Royal Family 'almost immediately' after she made them when she was 19.

In a clip unearthed, by Newsnight after she was announced in the final two candidates to be PM along with Rishi Sunak, the politician was recorded speaking about how she surveyed a 'reactionary-looking' trio of voters who told her that they had had 'enough' of the Royal Family.

The Foreign Secretary who used to be the leader of Oxford University's Liberal Democrats has recently said she now understands that the Queen and the rest of the Royals are 'key' to the success of the UK.

She became a Conservative in 1996, and today Truss lengthened her lead over Rishi Sunak in the race to become the new Tory leader and the Prime Minster after Boris Johnson stepped down.

In the clip shared by Newsnight, Truss told the conference: 'We Liberal Democrats believe in opportunity for all.

'I was being interviewed by Newsnight earlier this afternoon and we were filmed asking members of the public what they thought about the Monarchy.

'We came across a group of three people. I'd say they were around 50, 60 [years of age]. [They] looked fairly middle class, rather smart and in fact rather reactionary to be perfectly frank.

'We asked them they're opinion of the Monarch, do you know what they said? They said: 'Abolish them. We've had enough'.'

She also went on to say during the same speech that she agreed with former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown on the Monarchy.

'I agree with Paddy Ashdown when he said: 'Everybody in Britain should have the chance to be a somebody,' she said in Brighton.

'But only one family can provide the head of the state. We Liberal Democrats believe in opportunity for all. We do not believe people are born to rule.

'We believe in referenda on major constitutional issues; we do not believe people should be born to rule, or that they should put up and shut up about decisions which affect their everyday lives.'

Asked when she realised she did not want to scrap the monarchy, she told reporters in Peterborough in July: 'Almost immediately after I'd made that speech.

'I was a teenager at the time and I do believe that people who never change their mind on anything and think the same at 16 as they do at 46 are, well, first of all they're not normal people like I am, and secondly, you know,

'I've got the ability to learn from mistakes I've made, things that I've done that are wrong and move on.'

Truss is now also seen to be on the right of the party. ‘Under my leadership, I would start cutting taxes from day one to take immediate action to help people deal with the cost of living,’ she has said.

Miss Underestimated: Critics say she’s just a political chameleon. But her teachers, relatives and old friends reveal exactly what makes Liz Truss tick

ByRichard Kayand Andrew Pierce for the Daily Mail 

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 on Tuesday Liz Truss acquired the keys to No 10 and became the third.

As the Tory leadership election votes were 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 hunkered down at Chevening, the then-Foreign Secretary’s official residence in Kent.

There were putting the finishing touches to a Cabinet line-up that she hoped 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 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

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