Throughout the leadership contest, Liz Truss has been all too keen to paint herself as a Brexit queen, keen to slay the dragons of Brussels. Yet Mr S has been doing some digging into the Foreign Secretary’s past and it transpires she was rather more of a Europhile than previously revealed. Truss even headed up a pro-EU group that backed the Maastricht Treaty while a student at Oxford University doing PPE.
Despite being a late convert to the Brexit cause, the PM-in-waiting was once an active Liberal Democrat and pro-European. As a blue stocking girl in the mid-1990s she was a key player in the federalist Oxford Reform Club, even being snapped alongside Theresa May’s controversial EU negotiator Olly Robbins when the pair were students. The group was set up in the 1990s by Mark Littlewood, the future director general of the IEA think tank, to campaign for the UK to become more integrated in the vastly enlarged EU super state. Truss served as vice-president in 1995, with one source confiding to Steerpike that the group’s main purpose was “to annoy Dan Hannan and the Campaign for an Independent Britain.” Hannan set up the group at the same university to oppose the Maastricht Treaty; he is now one of the Tory politicians backing Truss for PM.
Talk about strange political bedfellows. Mr S hears that further revelations about Truss’s past are expected in the forthcoming weekend newspapers, with rumours of a book about the Foreign Secretary already in the works. Truss told one Tory hustings that “there are no skeletons in my closet”. Will that prove to be the case?
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