FIZZ’S WITH LIZ

With her support among grassroots Tories, Liz Truss has the edge in the leadership race

- AJISH P. JOY

For many members of the Truss family, the ongoing churn in British politics must have come as a bittersweet experience. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, inarguably the most famous member of the family, is just a heartbeat away from becoming the leader of the Conservative Party and the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. But her uncle Richard, an 80-year-old retired priest, told The Times that the family had liberalism in its blood and that it must still be in his niece’s blood as well. Her father, John Kenneth Truss, a mathematics professor at the University of Leeds, has not been able to comprehend his daughter’s transformation into a Tory. For a while, he even thought that she could be a “sleeper working from inside to overthrow the Conservative regime”.

Mary Elizabeth Truss was born in Oxford on July 26, 1975, to John and Priscilla, who worked as a nurse and a teacher. Her parents—both committed Labour supporters—often took her to political demonstrations, especially against the policies of prime minister Margaret Thatcher. When Truss was four, the family moved to Paisley, near Glasgow. She can still recall one particular anti-Thatcher slogan from those days. “It was in Scottish, so it was ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, oot, oot, oot’,” she told the BBC, an ironic slogan for a future Tory PM-hopeful.