‘Only interested in her own career’: Liz Truss fans prove elusive in constituency town

Retired legal administrator Karen Porter would like to see a return to the philosophy of Thomas Paine. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

If the radical political thinker Thomas Paine had been around today, Liz Truss would have been his MP, but he would not have been one of her supporters. Thetford’s most famous son believed in taxing the rich, overthrowing governments and thought all Tories were “cowards”.

Beside Paine’s statue in the Norfolk market town, some of Truss’s constituents are equally disparaging.