Elizabeth Truss

Liz Truss is the President of the Board of Trade and Secretary of State for International Trade as well as the minister for women and equalities. Truss has been a prominent member of the Conservative team since she was first elected in 2010. Born in Oxford, Truss grew up in a Labour-voting household and attended schools in Paisley, Leeds and Canada. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, where she was president of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats. Following her graduation, she joined the Conservative Party and worked for several firms including Shell and Cable & Wireless. Between 1998-2000 she was chair of the Lewisham Deptford Conservative Association and the following year contested Hemsworth at the general election, coming second behind Labour’s Jon Trickett. She stood for parliament for the second time at the following general election, this time for Calder Valley and came second again. In 2006, she was elected to Greenwich Council. At the 2010 general election, she held South West Norfolk for the Conservatives with a majority of 13,140. She joined the Justice Committee upon entering Parliament. She became parliamentary under-secretary at the Department for Education in 2012 and pushed for compulsory maths education until the age of 18. She joined the cabinet as environment secretary from 2014-2016, where she went viral with comments about the “disgrace” of importing cheese. She embraced the joke, however, and became one of the most active politicians on Twitter and Instagram. Truss became justice secretary in 2016 but was criticised for not defending the independence of the High Court judges who were first to rule against the government’s bid to use its prerogative power to trigger Article 50 and was subsequently moved to the role of chief secretary to the treasury. Although a Remainer, Truss would later say “we must unleash the dynamism and talent of Britain to make a huge success of our economy by taking full advantage of the new freedom we will have [after leaving the EU].” Truss supported Boris Johnson as Conservative party leader and was rewarded with her appointment to the Department of International Trade.