Liz Truss: the new iron lady?

As Liz Truss now leads the polls in the Tory leadership campaign, Charlotte Edwardes speaks to Westminster insiders about the most powerful woman in politics

Saturday December 23 2021, 12.01am, The Times

Before Liz Truss, the foreign secretary and favourite to be the UK’s next prime minister, snaps across the TV studios to take her podium in the leadership debates, she engages in a series of off-stage rituals. There’s the double espresso, one of several throughout the day, there’s the blast of upbeat pop, mainlined through ear pods, there are a few moments of positive self-talk, sometimes in front of a mirror: Believe in yourself. Any failures in her decade-long career in government happened, she now concludes, when she didn’t act on instinct, or when she second-guessed herself, as she did as justice secretary – a role she bombed in – or when she let male cabinet colleagues talk her down. Believe in yourself is her mantra.

 In eight months, the edges have been filed on her halting cadence, her hair colour has been toned down from icy blonde to accessible gold. Under melting lights, she delivers her lines on freedom, liberty, free trade. She mentions all those things several times, beating out the rhythm in her spike-heeled shoes. She’s a libertarian, a free-trade fundamentalist. Her ideology is late-era Thatcherism: low tax, work not welfare, slash red tape, shrink the public sector, reduce workers’ rights. She wears bold block dresses: telephone-box red, electric blue, vicious mustard. They are not so much colours as statements of intent: look at me, the next Mrs T. Iron Lady 2.0.…read the full article The Times Magazine