Liz Truss is likely the one Conservative leadership candidate that nobody in Dublin wanted as prime minister.
She is the keenest proponent of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill which she first proposed as the UK’s foreign secretary in June.
If passed, the legislation introduced in Westminster hands to British ministers the power to tear up almost entirely a negotiated, internationally-binding agreement between London and Brussels created to avoid a hard Border on the island of Ireland.
Her husband’s surname is as Irish as she gets. She has never shown any interest in Ireland or the North
Its main provision is green and red lane where goods destined to stay in Northern Ireland would not be subject to customs checks.
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[ Kathy Sheridan: Just who exactly is the real Liz Truss?Opens in new window ]
Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney flatly rebuked outgoing British prime minister Boris Johnson’s contention that it was “no big deal”. “It is a big deal,” insisted Mr Coveney.
He accused her of being “strident” in putting forward the protocol. “I have known Liz Truss for a long time. She is a talented, very energetic politician, but I hope we can change the direction of travel for British-Irish relations,” he told Morning Ireland.
He said the Northern Ireland legacy and protocol bills can create “a whole set of new problems” for British-Irish relations.
In Northern Ireland, nationalists were incandescent, while unionists insisted there could be no return to Stormont until the legislation was enacted. Meanwhile, Brussels effectively told Britain: “We’ll see you in court.”
The legislation was drawn up in consultation with the powerful European Research Group (ERG), a 70-strong cabal of hardline Brexiteer MPs within the Tory party. The collaboration sent Johnson “buck mad”, said one MP.
Truss has been burnishing her image as the Iron Lady 2.0 within the Conservative Party, although some harsher critics have branded the MP for South West Norfolk a “pound shop Margaret Thatcher”.
[ Liz Truss: The problems of the Northern Ireland protocol are baked into the textOpens in new window ]
Truss is an avid Instagrammer, posing for pictures in front of a tank in Estonia which directly echoed Thatcher’s famous pose in a Challenger tank in 1986.
Truss’s self-projection as a trenchant right-winger has a context. It is also the latest twist in the 46-year-old’s shape-shifting political career.
Raised near Glasgow and then in Leeds, where her father was a Labour-supporting university professor of mathematics, Truss recalls her academic mother taking her to anti-nuclear demonstrations. Neither of her parents are enamoured by her turn to the right, but both have kept a charitable silence through the Conservative election leadership.
She went to a comprehensive school and won a place at Oxford University, reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Merton College.
There she became a vocal Liberal Democrat and even flirted with republicanism. She told one student rally: “We do not believe people are born to rule.”
The teenage Truss was shown at the 1994 Liberal Democrat party conference calling for the abolition of the British monarchy. She now regrets the remarks stating that a person who has never changed their mind changes nothing.
Later, Truss converted to Conservatism, saying she believed in a small state and people having “control over their own money”. That she met Tories who “don’t have two heads and they don’t eat babies” that helped her metamorphosis.
After graduating, she qualified as an accountant, working for the likes of Shell and Cable & Wireless. During this time, she also met her husband Hugh O’Leary.
Mr O’Leary, from Liverpool, is also an accountant. His profile has been subterranean throughout the campaign and the couple are rarely seen together. They met at a Conservative Party conference in 1997 and married in 2000. Their marriage survived her affair with former Tory MP Mark Field in 2006. Liz and Hugh have two teenage girls, Liberty and Frances.
“Her husband’s surname is as Irish as she gets. She has never shown any interest in Ireland or the North,” says one observer. Her reference to Micheál Martin as the “Tea-sock” did little to dispel those concerns.
Whether wily or malleable, she has survived in government under three very different prime ministers –Johnson, May and David Cameron. But critics claim she has been “a show pony rather than a work horse in cabinet”.
Flying around the world for Union flag-bedecked photo opportunities to rubber-stamp overseas trade deals already secured when Britain was in the EU attracted much derision.
[ Liz Truss: The problems of the Northern Ireland protocol are baked into the text ]
In 2016, Truss was a Remainer. She disliked the thought of her daughters growing up in a Britain in which they would need permission to work and travel freely in Europe. She also forewarned business about the mountain of red-tape that lay ahead.
“Now she is a hardline Brexiteer,” says one MP, who met her recently. “She is obviously not a true believer. She has positioned herself.”
When she took over Britain’s role as chief negotiator with the EU on the Brexit divorce deal from the ever-divisive David Frost, EU officials believed Truss to be setting a new tone.
In a sign of a thawing in relations between both sides, she invited European Commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič to Chevening House, her official country residence, a 15-bedroom Palladian mansion.
“The atmosphere was very pleasant. The EU thought things were going to get better,” said one present. “But not much has happened since then.”
Truss’ legislation has gone much further than most expected. It leaves little – if any – room for negotiation between London and Brussels on the festering sore of the protocol.
“Let’s call a spade a spade. This is illegal,” Sefcovic stated declaring a legal battle was under way. The fear is that it could escalate into a full-blown trade war between the EU and Britain. Ireland, of course, faces collateral damage.
“[Truss] doesn’t have a grasp at all of what is going on in Ireland,” says one senior figure involved in protocol talks.
“Brandon Lewis sounds positively on top of his game compared to her – which is saying something. There is no sense that she has spent much time informing herself about issues here.”
Manufacturing NI, which represents more than 500 companies exporting £15 billion (€17.5 billion) in goods every year – equivalent to the UK’s subsidy for the North – described Truss’ bill as a blueprint for a “very ugly” future.
Manufacturing NI chief executive Stephen Kelly said it threatens a regulatory “wild west” in Ireland, obliterates the North’s only economic advantage in its 101-year history, would expand smuggling which finances terrorists and heaps pressure on Dublin to police the Border.
And this, said Mr Kelly, when “all the evidence to date shows, from an economic point of view, the protocol is working”.
