Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of Liz Truss and Her Astonishing Rise to Power

by Harry Cole

Despite several generations of Bible-bashing in the family, by the time baby Mary arrived it was a house that had turned from Christianity to the embrace of left-wing politics. John was a maths prodigy who won a place at Cambridge a year early and was once ‘pretty religious’ but was said to have never forgiven God for the loss of his first-born son.

John Truss met Priscilla Grasby at Cambridge University in the late 1960s. They found common cause as ‘not exactly communist sympathisers but certainly socialists’, according to one who knew them well.

spite of her upbringing as the privately educated granddaughter of a capitalist mill boss, Priscilla was clearly sympathetic to the Marxist cause.

Anti-English sentiment was in the air: the Thatcher government was deeply unpopular in Paisley, one of the few constituencies to have never elected a Tory to Parliament before or since.

Truss’s views at this time were a mix of social liberal, political radical and economic conservative, which fits with her self-conscious anti-establishment bent.

In private she described her Oxford contemporaries in Blair’s new model army as simply ‘awful people’. Her fundamental rejection of the left has been described as being ‘deeply held and almost personal … she has no friends on the Labour benches’.14

Like Truss, O’Leary was raised in the north, in the affluent Liverpool suburb of Allerton before a move to Heswall on the Wirral. His father, John, was a lecturer and solicitor who married Susan, a nurse, in 1972.

According to family friends, O’Leary has been a great asset to Truss in her political activities too.

‘On a lot of things he’s adviser number one. He is incredibly political, very right wing, unbelievably right wing – he’s almost as right wing as her. He loves the Tory party.’ Having met his wife at a Conservative party conference, O’Leary proved to be a regular at the annual gathering. He was spotted in the bars of the 2022 event, moving anonymously through the crowd, meeting friends and collecting gossip.

Truss ended up taking voluntary redundancy from the firm in March 2005, citing a ‘number of reasons’ for her decision to quit. Her departure was part of a ‘staff exodus’ that saw eight of a 35-strong communications team leave, following an internal merger.

One ‘senior Conservative’ was later quoted as saying: ‘The Tories have a system of established MPs acting as mentors to young activists. Liz was sent to “shadow” Mark, but it seems Mark took his mentoring duties more seriously than intended.’

All involved in the affair have subsequently avoided any public reference to it. However Field – who left the Commons in 2019 – did raise eyebrows in 2022, shortly after Truss became Prime Minister. In his new capacity as an Isle of Man banker, he praised her as ‘an instinctive risk taker … highly intelligent, immensely energetic and pragmatic’ in an article evaluating her government’s prospects.

He rejected claims he was simply ‘anti-women’, telling the Telegraph: ‘I have got absolutely nothing against women. Who cooks my lunch? Who cooks my dinner?’

‘Cummings took against her from day one,’ claims one adviser. ‘He was horrified by the appointment.’ He would later describe Truss as ‘truly useless’, ‘mad as a box of snakes’ and ‘about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament’.

Truss enthused on her return that Shanghai’s ‘skyscrapers, and its ambitions, are all built on maths. That respect for the subject, matched with that belief in every single child, is what should really inspire us.’

David Laws was less sure: ‘I like Liz but she doesn’t listen very much, and when people try to make points, she just talks straight over them in a slightly irritating and rather “deaf” way.

Be it divine intervention, or a twist of fate, or the recommendation of Gove, Liz Truss walked up the famous street and into the history books as the youngest-ever female Cabinet minister at just 38.

Others try to counter this. One former aide says: ‘She doesn’t look at things emotionally, she just doesn’t have an emotional kind of response. She looks at everything as a logical problem.

Mark Littlewood, Truss’s confidant since Oxford, was one of many who went from being pro-Europe in the mid-1990s to staunchly Eurosceptic by the mid-2010s. He recalls how different ‘Europe’ was viewed to a young free marketeer in the 1990s: ‘On the face of it, the European project was on an exciting, liberalising trajectory’ he wrote in the Telegraph ‘It was about removing barriers erected by nation states in order to facilitate trade and free exchange. Over many years – and only incrementally – did the EU’s obsession with regulatory conformity oblige free-market liberals to seriously question whether the European Union was now more of a socialist than a liberal enterprise.’

thought it was appalling behaviour by Michael,’ a seething Truss would tell friends. Up until that point, she would have described herself as ‘a Gove fan’ but now she could never trust him again. ‘It was a massive betrayal of trust.’

In becoming the first female Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Truss smashed another glass ceiling, And, at 41, she would be the youngest holder of the office since George Jeffreys, the ‘hanging judge’ of the 1680s. But the falling shards cut deep; her appointment was met with howls of anguish from the legal establishment. Before her robes of office had even been fitted, her number two at the department walked out, saying she was a lightweight.

While Grayling was widely seen as a book-banning hang ’em-and-flog-’em disaster, there had been grudging respect for the work done by Gove. In the 14 months after he was resurrected to the full Cabinet by David Cameron after the 2015 Election, he had set in motion major reforms to both prisons and courts.

By the summer of 2016 the Ministry of Justice had earned the internal nickname ‘HMP Shitshow’, and Truss entered at its lowest ebb. Cuts to the prison service were blamed for a dramatic surge of violence on the prison estate.

In the middle of December 2016, a 14-hour riot involving at least six hundred prisoners broke out at the G4S-run HMP Birmingham. ‘Chronic staff shortages’ would eventually be blamed for the mass disturbance that broke out on four wings on the morning of 16 December.

On 18 April 2017, Theresa May unexpectedly called a snap general election. Like the vast majority of the Cabinet, Truss barely figured in the Tory campaign. By this point Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood was said to have been advising the PM that relations with the judiciary were in such dire straits that Truss would have to be moved, if as expected the Tories crushed Jeremy Corbyn and returned with a massive majority.

But fast-forward 11 months, ‘and her view is that it almost ended her career by being too dependent on advice and not following her own instincts’. It was not a mistake she was willing to make again.

As Cabinet Office Director of Probity and Ethics, Sue Gray was used to being the Whitehall judge and jury. Usually her role during reshuffles was limited to asking the successfully appointed ministers questions about their finances, mistresses and internet search histories. But that weekend she was playing executioner too. By Friday lunchtime Gray was holed up in May’s private office, running the infamous reshuffle whiteboard in lieu of Spads and spinners … except no one could be put to the wall with a PM too weak to actually sack anyone.

But it was the boiling rage that Truss was in after a notably brief chat in May’s study that most witnesses remember to this day. Demoted, and stripped of a £15,000 salary, Truss was livid. ‘I think this is incredibly unfair,’ she told the PM after being informed she was being downgraded. After four years as a full member of the Cabinet, she was now only invited to attend its meetings.

Williamson would achieve £800 million in the 2018 Autumn Statement for his troubles. ‘He would have got more if he hadn’t been such a dick,’ a Hammond ally confides.

Among those on the outside Truss enlisted was Sophie Jarvis, head of government affairs at the Adam Smith Institute, who was once described as putting ‘the tank in think tank’.12 She would be a key lieutenant in Truss’s rise to the top.

When she was appointed Trade Secretary, friends say she was a little miffed to have missed out on a bigger department given she was first out of the blocks to back BoJo.

‘It was the perfect example of Liz’s total misunderstanding of social context and social norms. Lighthizer would start saying something just being nice, and Liz would just interrupt him and just go off on like a weird tangent about shortbread.’

The trade establishment were not as snooty as the lawyers Truss encountered at Justice, but it appears Truss had alienated them just as quickly. Officials used words like ‘unclubbable’ and ‘cold front’ to describe their new boss, and were quick to bombard her with technical discussions to try to bamboozle her.

Determined to get Stein in, Truss sought a backdoor route instead. She signed off Finsbury to be external contractors – ignoring advice from officials that they were not on a Whitehall-approved list. On a mammoth £80,000 per quarter contract, for six months, it was expensive.

‘The whole lockdown experience was interesting to her because it made her much closer to her family,’ says a friend. ‘It was the first time that they’ve spent all day, every day together and they grew much, much closer.’

If Truss was going all the way, Kwarteng would be her number 2 and biggest advocate. With Brexit negotiator David Frost and Truss ally James Cleverly also living in the leafy corner of south-east London, what would be known as the ‘Greenwich Set’ was born.

Truss’s aide Sophie Jarvis is credited with having hardened her stance on Beijing. Jarvis, who ran Truss’s parliamentary outreach, was a key backchannel between the minister and the China hawks like Sir Iain Duncan Smith.

Cabinet colleagues including Sunak and Michael Gove urged further negotiations rather than bellicose threats to walk away.

With foreign affairs, Ukraine diplomacy, the Commonwealth, international development, Brexit negotiations, women, equalities and representing South West Norfolk, Truss’s many duties reflected her growing power base in government. And her team correspondingly swelled to a record seven special advisers in January – the most for any Foreign Secretary – just one short of Sunak’s combined No. 10 and 11 unit.

As Truss’s team and demands expanded, so did her list of enemies. It was around this time that someone purporting to be a senior civil servant at the Foreign Office began an anonymous letter-writing campaign to prominent foreign editors at national newspapers. These poison-pen notes were withering in their assessment of Truss’s handling of the department, as well as of her behaviour on the diplomatic circuit.

The letters would recommend journalists target specific Freedom of Information requests to the Foreign Office to back up their claims, begging for help in removing ‘a cynical and incompetent disgrace’ from government.

She was blunt and to the point, telling one visitor: ‘I think I would be a very good Prime Minister, there are just two problems: I am weird and I don’t have any friends. How can you help me fix that?’

Arriving at the Kremlin and led into an ante-room, Truss and her entourage, including security advisers and Adam Jones, were stripped of their phones and cut off from the outside world.

So it came as a surprise to see him take to the stage to endorse Sunak at the former Chancellor’s slick Westminster launch the next morning. Shapps was on the stage too, prompting a campaign source to vow privately to journalists on Tuesday ‘their careers are over. If you’re on the stage you’re in a grave.’

The rivals were Sunak, insurgent Kemi Badenoch, right-winger Braverman, moderate Tom Tugendhat, Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, 2019 loser Jeremy Hunt, and popular if vague Penny Mordaunt.

Revie’, Leeds United’s most celebrated manager, the crowd were loving it. Attacks on Keir Starmer the ‘patronising plastic patriot’ landed well too.

Subsequently, a number of Truss’s aides would rue the personnel changes agreed at Chevening. ‘I think it was the appointment of the Cabinet that was the problem,’ says one. ‘Wendy Morton should never have been Chief Whip, Kwasi should never have been Chancellor, Jacob Rees-Mogg should never have been Business. Suella, Ranil, couldn’t put them on the media. The minute she put them in the Cabinet, it started to go wrong.’

Such advice appears to have been disregarded, with several of Truss’s aides suggesting she was cut off in this critical period from candid allies who would have been willing to interrogate some of the key assumptions of her mini-Budget. Instead – surrounded by a coterie of unquestioning civil servants in the splendid isolation of the Grade I listed residence – she ploughed on with the plans that would prove to be her undoing.

But even in the earliest hours of her premiership, aides were worried about the new PM’s behaviour. Changing her mobile number for a third time in as many weeks left her isolated and cut from external advice and MPs.

But, as with her arrival at Trade and the Foreign Office, Truss was not averse to a sweeping clear-out of officials she considered to be ‘NQOT’ or ‘not quite our type’. The sacking of long-standing Treasury Permanent Secretary Tom Scholar on day one would spark howls of derision once the news was released later in the week. But