Liz Truss: the long-serving minister who hardly left a trace in her rise to the top

John Rentoul reviews the diaries, memoirs and instant histories

The No 10 frontrunner merits only a passing reference in Cameron’s memoir (Jacob King/PA)

Liz Truss has been a minister for 10 years and a cabinet minister for eight, and yet the imprint she has made on the first drafts of history has been light.

As a politics obsessive, I have collected all the memoirs, diaries and instant histories, and her name appears surprisingly rarely in the indices.

The fullest account of what she was like as a minister comes from David Laws, the Liberal Democrat who was minister of state in the Department for Education when Truss was a junior minister there between 2012 and 2014. Laws recorded his first meeting with “the irrepressible Liz Truss” in September 2012 in his Coalition Diaries: “Liz is mind-bogglingly ambitious, and has Duracell-like reserves of energy. I will need to keep an eye on her!”

By the following month, he had decided what he thought of her: “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. Once she’s made up her mind, she switches into full auto-drive mode.”

At a meeting in 10 Downing Street to discuss her childcare policy, he said: “While Liz was in the middle of one of her long descriptions of how her policy should work and why it was better than all the other options, I happened to glance up to the wall behind her, and there looking down on us was a portrait of Margaret Thatcher. Liz Truss is, in fact, like a young Margaret Thatcher on speed, and either she’s going to shoot straight to the top of the cabinet or she’s going to overdo it and blow up entirely.”

Laws confided in his diary that he thought she would succeed, “but we’ll have to see”. He proved to be a good judge of Conservative politics. After just two years, David Cameron promoted Truss to the cabinet, to be secretary of state at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

She merits only a passing reference in Cameron’s memoir For the Record, however, as one of a group. The headliners of the 2014 reshuffle were Sajid Javid and Nicky Morgan, according to Cameron. “I looked at people like this and saw the modern, compassionate Conservative Party I had always wanted to build. They’d come of age as junior ministers and were ready for the next step up – into cabinet or senior ministerial roles. Along with Matt Hancock, Liz Truss, Stephen Crabb, Anna Soubry, Tina Stowell and Esther McVey, this was my dream team – the line-up I wanted to present to the electorate in less than a year’s time.”

After a couple of pages recounting how hard it was to move people – this was the reshuffle in which Michael Gove, Truss’s secretary of state at education, was demoted to chief whip – Cameron has one line about a change lower down in the cabinet pecking order: “Liz Truss, I was sure, would excel at Defra.” I simply cannot tell whether or not there is a hint of sarcasm in that bland sentence.

As it was, Truss made little impression at Defra, apart from her Conservative conference speech that year in which her condemnation of cheese imports and smile after boasting of opening up pork markets in Beijing became a viral video. The only other mention she has in Cameron’s memoir is when he records how he and George Osborne saw all the members of the cabinet in the days before the crucial EU summit in February 2016, to try to persuade them to support his renegotiated terms of EU membership in the referendum.

He wrote: “George did an excellent job with Sajid Javid, who was far more pro-Brexit than I had thought. I failed dismally with Priti Patel, who revealed that she had always wanted to leave, but succeeded with Liz Truss and Jeremy Wright, who had both been wavering. All these conversations were far harder than I had anticipated. The latent Leaver gene in the Tory party was more dominant than I had foreseen.”

That is interesting, because it confirms Truss’s own account, that she was torn and was, like Javid and Theresa May, very much a reluctant Remainer. After the referendum, however, her “shooting straight to the top of the cabinet” stalled under May. Truss served as justice secretary for a year, but May – and Fiona Hill, May’s  joint chief of staff – did not trust her in the 2017 election campaign.

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According to Tim Shipman in Fall Out, the definitive account of the period, Hill had “views on which ministers were allowed on television” that were “arbitrary and unbending”. She had a list of “good communicators”: Amber Rudd, David Davis, Priti Patel and Michael Fallon. Those on the “never use” list included Liam Fox, Andrea Leadsom and Chris Grayling – and Philip Hammond, the chancellor. “Others banished to media Siberia included Justine Greening, the education secretary; Liz Truss, the justice secretary; and David Lidington.”

Demoted to chief secretary to the Treasury after the election, Truss was suspected by No 10 of being one of “the four big leakers”, along with Sajid Javid, Gavin Williamson and Boris Johnson, in a cabinet described by Sir Anthony Seldon, in his instant history May At 10, as the “leakiest in history”.

Her upward trajectory resumed when Johnson became prime minister and made her international trade secretary, which turned out to be the chance to rebrand as the Brexitiest of Brexiteers. The penultimate rocket boost was her appointment as foreign secretary last September, as a counterweight to Rishi Sunak’s ambition.

In her ascent, she was noticed, when she was noticed at all, as ambitious, energetic and media-focused. The only witness in this brief survey to have worked closely with her, David Laws, liked her, but found her “irritating” and “very difficult”. If Truss wins, she will enter No 10 with a long ministerial career behind her that offers few clues to how she will be in the top job.