Mark Field muses on Liz Truss’s fortunes

Since becoming the Tory leadership favourite early last month, Liz Truss is used to all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork. Old friends, former allies and even the odd foe have been very keen to share their opinions on Truss, the onetime Lib Dem radical turned Brexit-backing cabinet mainstay. But one person who we haven’t heard much from is Mark Field, her fellow former Conservative MP, with whom Truss had a headline-grabbing affair in the mid-2000s.

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But now the Camden New Journal have set tongues wagging with a cheeky little piece in this week’s edition about what Field has been up to since leaving parliament in late 2019. The Journal – the organ of the north London intelligentsia – is the local paper in Sir Keir Starmer’s patch and is known for its particularly lengthy letters section, where angry Corbynites snipe at one another. It published a short item this week, picked up by Times hack Patrick Maguire, noting that Field has ‘kept a very low profile since his departure from frontline politics’ but is now working as chairman of the Capital International Bank based on the Isle of Man.

In an article published last week on the company’s website, Field mused on the big issues facing British politics. Under the headline ‘What Lies Ahead?’ he told his readers that Liz Truss was ‘an instinctive risk taker… highly intelligent, immensely energetic and pragmatic.’ He claimed she had bested Rishi Sunak by ‘skilfully craftering her appeal as the candidate of change’ and employing a ‘bucaneering style’. Sadly though, Field questioned whether Truss could ‘inspire the nation’ claiming that ‘any political honeymoon she has may prove very short’ and sniffing that the new PM was the first choice of ‘fewer than 15 per cent of her colleagues.’

Let’s hope he wasn’t harbouring any hopes of a peerage…