It is a curious feature of politics that politicians only appear impressive before or after they enter senior office, never during. Prior to entering the fray, fresh faced youngsters with a glint in their eye ooze public spirit and hope. A cynical public is taught to believe again, and the individual is elevated to high office. They then find themselves in a Sisyphean nightmare where they are doomed to be outed as a bastard or an idiot – and they’re lucky if it’s not both. The wise ones walk quickly down Downing Street on reshuffle day, eager for the relief that lies inside.
We may be witnessing an exception to the rule. Despite a lack of media attention [edit: no longer the case!], Liz Truss, the new Foreign Secretary, is intent on delivering on a clear ideological vision, providing populist clarity to Brexit’s vagaries.
Like many before her, Truss entered politics with a vision. She was the driving force behind the group of 2010 neo-Thatcherite Conservatives who authored the now infamous polemic Britannia Unchained. Its authors, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Kwasi Kwarteng, Chris Skidmore and, of course, Truss, are now in high places. But Truss alone retains the book’s integrity, as the others have, in their own way, failed to deliver on the promises of their youth.
During her two-year stint as Secretary of State for International Trade, Truss followed her principles and successfully delivered 70 trade agreements. In doing so, she has become quite possibly the only minister to exceed expectations in their response to Brexit.
As a reward, in the reshuffle Truss replaced Raab as Foreign Secretary. It is already clear Raab will be remembered as Truss-lite, a disciple rather than a visionary who pursued the cause without equal fervour or lucidity. Truss said it herself, she’s more ideologically motivated than most politicians. As such, she is likely to offer a much clearer vision of what Global Britain will actually mean.
This is why the Conservative Party loves her. She offers hope of an intellectual heft and clarity of vision to muscle Brexit into reality. She outlined this manifesto for an offensive, free trading foreign policy tying Britain’s digital economy to the fast-growing Tiger Economies of East Asia at the Policy Exchange in mid-September, and again at her Conference speech.
Truss grounds these lofty intellectual arguments in the concerns of ordinary people. She coined the phrase ‘Lidl Tories’, working class people who support free trade due to concerns about food prices (interestingly harking back to free trade debates during the early twentieth century). In doing so she appeals to the Conservatives new ‘Red Tory’ voter base.
Truss doesn’t have it all figured out just yet. There are crucial questions to answer if she is to turn her post-Brexit vision into a success; how to square Global Britain’s internationalism with the levelling up agenda’s insular tendencies, how to balance post-covid appetite for interventionism with the desire for a ‘Singapore-on-sea’, how can Britain meaningfully reach out to our self-declared partners in the Indo-Pacific when they are quite literally half a world away, can post-Brexit Britain afford to deprioritise Europe, should Britain follow the lead nineteenth-century free trade advocates and aspire to ‘goodwill between all nations’ or will she double down on Raab’s hard line on China, what policies will she use to achieve all this, and how can Global Britain deal with the reality that many Britons simply don’t want to be global?
Truss’ legacy will depend on her ability to answer these questions. As she grapples with them over the coming months, for better or worse, we will get a flavour of what her political career, and ultimately post-Brexit Britain, will mean.
It would be foolish to dismiss her, bringing up unfortunate Conservative Party Conference speeches of the past (that cheese speech). As we have seen in her recent performances, she is uniquely positioned to deliver on the Conservatives popular post-Brexit pledges, while providing a rare example of a politician who ‘came good’ on their promises.
While most looked to Boris Johnson’s predictably bombastic keynote speech to define the Conservative conference, we shouldn’t write off Brexit’s awkward visionary.
Ben's Blog 
