Revealed: Liz Truss’s youthful escapades

One of the more amusing aspects of the Tory leadership race has been various reminders of Liz Truss’s misspent youth. Whether it was leafleting for the Liberal Democrats, running for the party’s student executive or causing trouble at the university, Truss certainly had something of a political journey before opting for a conventional route into Conservative politics.

And, still, the greatest hits keep on coming. For tucked away in the LSE archives are copies of the Free Radical – the former newspaper of the Lib Dem youth wing. And who should author an article in the summer 1994 edition making an impassioned case for the lowering of the voting age? Why, none other than one ‘Elizabeth Truss’, who decries ‘the right-wing authoritarian lobby’ and suggests ‘the age of criminal responsibility should come to us with the right to vote.’ That, of course, would mean 10-year-olds casting ballots.

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In an article headlined ‘So why can’t kids have the vote?’ the future Foreign Secretary argued that the Lib Dems’ ‘policy of majority at sixteen’ was ‘merely a redefinition of where adulthood begins’ and that ‘young people need the vote to make themselves heard.’ She asked ‘Is it generally surprising that those so shunned by politicians take the law into their own hands… the fifteen year olds who are criticised daily by the Tory press do not commit crimes because they have no political representation but this is a sign of the lack of respect and truss that they command in society.’

Truss concluded by surveying the fate of her short-changed contemporaries and arguing that ‘only by giving young people a say will this situation be rectified’. She ends by saying that ‘one day discrimination against the young will be acknowledged as the last great barrier to true liberty.’ In the same issue is a picture of Truss protesting the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill, passed by Michael Howard.

Elsewhere in the archive is Truss’s manifesto to be a ‘Policy Development Officer’, a position for which she was elected in early 1995 but resigned later that year. Asked by Nick Ferrari on LBC last night about her speech calling for the abolition of the monarchy at the 1994 party conference, Truss replied that ‘almost as soon as I made the speech, I regretted it.’ But in her manifesto, Truss gave the speech pride of place, writing that ‘Everybody has the right to be treated with respect as a person, without discrimination, favouritism or patronising paternalism. That is why I campaigned against the monarchy and prohibition of cannabis. It is also why I want decentralised decision-making.’

Still, as she said last night, ‘I saw the error of their ways’ and within two years of serving on the Lib Dem youth executive, she was attending Tory conferences instead. At least she stuck to the old Churchill aphorism…