Liz Truss may trail Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak in the Conservative leadership race, but as the “continuity candidate” to succeed Boris Johnson, she has a hard-right base to please. To that end, she has chosen to repeat old attacks on her home and her old school. She lived and went to school in Roundhay, a leafy suburb of Leeds. I know a bit about it – I grew up there at the same time. I too went to that school.
Truss claims to have grown up in a “red wall” seat. This is not just a wilful anachronism, it is flatly untrue. Leeds North East, the constituency that contains both Roundhay school and the tall stone houses in which Truss and I grew up, was Conservative from 1955 to 1997 – by which time Truss had graduated from Oxford.
