Watching Liz Truss over the last 24 hours, and the 24 days since her election, has been a curious experience. To most people she is the woman blowing up the economy. To me, she’s my university nemesis.
Almost three decades ago, we were vocal opponents at Oxford University Student Union.
In the autumn of 1993, I was a 22-year-old, highly idealistic sabbatical officer at Oxford University, the kind 18-year-old Mary Elizabeth Truss most despised. Perhaps because we reminded her of her lefty dad.
I’d just finished an English degree and been elected as vice-president. Liz was a first-year student in politics, philosophy and economics, who arrived in an unnerving blaze of confidence. Within weeks, she had been co-opted into the student union as a Liberal Democrat member of the executive.
A committed contrarian, Liz seemed to confuse OUSU with the Oxford Union, a debating society more usually beloved of wannabe British prime ministers. She thrived on controversy – and could pick a fight with herself if no one else was available.
Under fire, she had the same emotional detachment with which she ploughed through yesterday morning’s local radio round. Doubling down was her modus operandi even then, seeming to thrive on going against what she saw as orthodoxy. There was no listening mode. Once she had an idea in her head, she was unshakeable.
Oxford was struggling with sexism at every level. More men than women got firsts, and there had been rapes and assaults that had provoked Reclaim The Night marches.
Liz’s priority was attacking the role of Women’s Officers, saying they were “patronising and sexist” and should be abolished.
The almighty row ended up on the front page of the newspaper, The Oxford Student, in February 1994 – just as she was standing for election.
She was duly elected – a pattern of exploiting the culture wars for votes that has served her well through all her political life.
An 18-year-old “fresher”, she had only been at the university four months, as a student at Merton, one of the oldest, wealthiest colleges. In a world of over-confident young men from Eton and Harrow, you had to admire her staggering self-confidence too.
With rosy cheeks, a neat centre parting, and a disarming tendency to laugh at her own jokes, Liz appeared like a lot of 18-year-olds who got into Oxford.
But as she revelled in the limelight cast by a student union audience of stoned twenty-somethings scoffing Monster Munch, she turned into someone else. The young woman you’ve probably seen in the video attacking the monarchy. And now the politician doubling down on one of the most disastrous fiscal events ever to hit the UK economy.
Then, as now, Liz wasn’t afraid to be unpopular. A student newspaper report of February 10, 1994, notes “intense and sometimes hostile debate between Truss and other council members”. She often lambasted me as a silly idealist, trendy lefty and member of the “PC brigade”.
As far as I saw it, me and my student union comrades only had a year to radically transform the elitist Oxford University into a social justice nirvana.
We planned to transform access to Oxford so that working class and kids from ethnic minorities had a fair chance to be there. We set up LGBT groups, held an alternative “ball”, and organised rent strikes. We ran a night bus and took turns driving it so women students could get home safely at night after a spate of attacks.
Among our more usual Etonian opponents, Liz remained a kind of enigma. She was a bit posh but was also northern and had been to a state school. Her dad was a left-wing maths lecturer of the kind who wore knitted waistcoats and went on CND marches. Her mum was rumoured to have been at Greenham Common, for us, the pinnacle of political cool.
They say you get more right wing as you get older. By the time she had graduated, Liz had moved from being president of the Lib Dems to becoming a Tory.
She had joined the Hayek Society, which celebrated Friedrich Hayek, sometimes known as the grandfather of neoliberalism.
Now she is destined to lead what may well be the most right-wing government in a century.
She was in the Reform Club where her contemporaries included Mark Littlewood, a Lib Dem turned Brexiteer. He is now director of the very right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs, the cult which incubated the Prime Minister and her Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. Littlewood has been one of the few doing the media rounds in defence of the Truss-Kwarteng mini-Budget.
I also eventually moved to the right – and joined the Labour Party. I became a trainee at the Daily Mirror, then went off to various warzones for other newspapers before rejoining the paper.
Liz went off to fossil-fuel giant, Shell, which explains her recent choice of donors, refusal to crack down on the energy giants, and her love of fracking.
While much of her generation drank the Kool-Aid of Cool Britannia, Liz fought in the unfashionable trenches of the right of the Tory Party, founding the free-enterprise group of free-market Tory MPs.
One of its early publications, Britannia Unchained, claimed Britons “are among the worst idlers in the world”, a view she still apparently holds according to a leaked conversation.
A worrying number of our contemporaries would go on to trouble the whole nation.
One time, when we were about to unanimously pass a motion to make sanitary products free across the university, a strange monocled creature in a tweed jacket dragged himself in from 1883 and sprawled across two chairs. He then read from the statute book until everybody left.
“That’s Jacob, a graduate student,” someone said. The same Jacob Rees-Mogg who is now the Business Secretary in Liz’s Cabinet.
Another one of her university acolytes was the baby-faced Sheridan Westlake – a Remainer in the sense that he has served every Tory Prime Minister since David Cameron at No10, and is now happily serving one more.
Since we last met, Liz, the girl whose mum took her to “Maggie Out” protests, has spent years cultivating a future as The Iron Lady’s heir, riding tanks in headscarves. The teenager who went on CND marches was quick to tell hustings audiences she was ready to hit the nuclear button.
The student anti-monarchist travelled to Balmoral to have her appointment anointed by the Queen, in one of the monarch’s poignant last acts.
Almost three decades later, Liz’s old routine of slaughtering the sacred cows of wokery for applause has paid out.
But Prime Minister Truss inherits a country caught in the crossfire of off-the-scale economic, social and environmental crises. She promised to “deliver, deliver, deliver”, but we didn’t know she meant delivering a financial crisis all of her own.
As we have seen over the last 24 hours, there is a vast difference between trolling the country in a Maggie headscarf and being the leader the country desperately needs.
As Britain faces a devastatingly bitter winter of discontent, and families genuinely fear for the future, I wish her the best of luck.
