Places so often come to define political leaders. Tony Blair’s constituency may have been Sedgefield in County Durham, but there was little doubt that his true constituency was Islington, north London. David Cameron emerged from the Notting Hill set with George Osborne and Michael Gove, before finding his heartland in the Cotswolds with a Chipping Norton crew who included a One Nation dream of Succession-lite media barons, TV bloviators and artisanal cheesemakers.
Liz Truss, Britain’s prime minister in waiting, is harder to pin geographically: she grew up in Oxford, Scotland and Canada, and finally won her parliamentary seat in South West Norfolk. So where is the spiritual home of Trussism? The answer, increasingly, seems to be a pleasant, affluent but not-very-Richard-Curtis run of streets west of the royal park in Greenwich, south-east London.
Truss has lived in the area for more than 15 years and her near neighbours include some of the major players in the post-Johnson Conservative party: Kwasi Kwarteng, tipped to be the next chancellor, lives on the same street as Truss; Lord Frost, the former Brexit minister and a potential future foreign secretary, is a two-minute walk away. James Cleverly, the education secretary, lives less than a mile down the road in Blackheath.
This group are lending her much more than a cup of sugar: all are vocal backers of Truss for Tory party leader. Kwarteng, the business secretary, introduced her campaign and the pair go back more than a decade, having been co-authors (along with Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Chris Skidmore) of the controversial 2012 political tract Britannia Unchained. Its most notorious passage included the line: “The British are among the worst idlers in the world.”
“The book basically talks about the fact that Britain needs to move to a much smaller state,” says Prof Tim Bale, author of The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron. “It’s very much a return to neoliberal Thatcherite Toryism. So there’s certainly an ideological affinity between Truss and Kwarteng.”
Last week Lord Frost published a long essay for the Policy Exchange thinktank, and Bale is convinced that when Frost writes about the new prime minister needing to be “turbulent and disruptive”, invoking the spirit of Thatcher in 1979, he’s thinking of Truss. “Frost clearly wants to play some kind of role,” says Bale. “If you look at this pamphlet, you could argue it’s the Truss manifesto writ large.”
The existence of the Greenwich gang, and their new place at the heart of British political discourse, surprises no one more than the residents of the area. They live in a small enclave of Georgian townhouses with Ocado vans outside, but the borough is a staunch Labour stronghold: at the council elections in May, Labour won 52 seats against just three for the Conservatives.
“Greenwich as a borough is really quite diverse,” says Darryl Chamberlain, founder of 853, a local news website. “The part they are in, west Greenwich going towards Blackheath, does sit a little apart from everywhere else. Most people are quite bemused to find that they’ve got these leading, very, very rightwing Conservatives living here.”
Bemused is perhaps polite. In a bookshop on elegant Royal Hill, I ask owner Anthony Simmonds if Truss or the others ever come in. “Can she read?” he asks. “I don’t know.” In their local pub, the Ashburnham Arms, landlady Pepina says one of the Tories has been in once. “But I don’t really care if they come in or not,” she adds. “All our customers are looked after the same.”
Truss was a councillor in Greenwich from 2006 to 2010, having lost at local elections in 1998 and 2002. Alex Grant, a Labour councillor who defeated her in those contests, finds it hard to fathom the lofty position she now occupies. “If you’d said to anyone in Greenwich in 1998 or 2002 that Liz Truss was going to become the Conservative party leader in 2022, and automatically become prime minister we’d have all fallen off our chairs with both laughter and surprise,” he says. “You often meet young politicians, and immediately sense that the person has star quality and is going to go far. But with Liz Truss that just wasn’t apparent.”
The question now is: does it matter that Truss and key figures in her circle have this connection with Greenwich? It may not, but it could inform the perception of her leadership, if she wins. The term “Notting Hill set” was originally coined – by Tory MP Derek Conway – to disparage Cameron and his modernising upstarts. The Chipping Norton set, says Bale, “suggested an elite that was insulated and out of touch with ordinary people”.
Dr Kevin Fewster, chairman of the Greenwich Society, would like to imagine that Truss, Kwarteng and Frost’s grounding in the area – and their exposure to the problems many residents face – will make them compassionate towards a country that faces an escalating cost-of-living crisis.
“There are many areas in Greenwich that suffer great deprivation and need to be supported,” he says. “So in that sense, I hope their local experiences can help them understand the wider agendas for the nation.”
