What Liz Truss didn’t say

As the big winner of the reshuffle, Liz Truss’s appointment as Foreign Secretary set the cat among the pigeons. Truss is the first Conservative woman to take on the brief and cuts a rather different figure to her predecessor Dominic Raab who was, by comparison, publicity shy. Since her promotion, there has been a non-stop stream of Twitter and Instagram posts documenting her meetings in New York, Mexico and Westminster. Today in Manchester, Truss gave her first speech to a domestic audience on what she wants to achieve.

The former International Trade Secretary was typically optimistic, saying she wanted to make sure Britain is ‘more competitive, bolder and more forward-leaning than any other country on earth’. She spoke of her desire to bring more countries into the liberal democratic sphere of influence by building strong ‘economic partnerships’ and thereby building this network of liberty’.