The first serious signs of cracks in my marriage began just as Elizabeth Truss entered my life. I’d been married to Michele, a director with two stockbroking firms, since 1994 and over the years we’d slowly begun to drift apart.
Children never seemed to be on the agenda. We hardly ever exchanged a cross word – I probably regarded this as a reassuring sign when perhaps alarm bells ought to have been ringing. For us both, I fear, an increasing amount of dissatisfaction became bottled up.
So, to the romantic, dimmed lights of early autumn on England’s self-styled Riviera. It is October 2002 at the Highcliff Hotel in Bournemouth, and the Conservative Party Conference is in full swing.
I am chatting away at a packed late-night bar with an old friend. Unobtrusively, Liz Truss sidles over to join us. I didn’t really know Liz then, though I knew of her. For the next half an hour, the three of us gossip away about current affairs, the future direction of the party and candidate selection − something close to Liz’s heart as, unlike me, she is not yet an MP.
‘The first serious signs of cracks in my marriage began just as Elizabeth Truss entered my life,’ writes Mark Field. Pictured: Liz Truss
Mark Field picutred in 2018, when he was minister of state for Asia and The Pacific
As we part, I wish her all the best in her search for a parliamentary seat and as a throwaway line say: ‘Please get in touch if I can be of any help.’
At the end of the conference I returned to London, where I was MP for the Cities of London & Westminster. When I made it into my parliamentary office the following Monday, I found a friendly email taking me up on my offer to help.
Liz wanted advice about selection interview techniques, so we met that same week. Over the next year, we got together for coffee or lunch on an increasingly regular basis. Even then, Liz came across as an impulsive bundle of energy, obsessed by the workings and machinations of politics.
As we worked together on landing her a seat, she approached the nerve-racking process of getting selected with laser-like precision – the parroting of slogans, the blind partisanship and the need to present it all with a veneer of absolute confidence. She was in her element.
Liz Truss with her husband, Hugh. Though Mark Field and his wife split up, ‘Liz’s marriage, however, had, and still has, endured’
Despite still only being in her late twenties, Liz came mighty close to selection in several Conservative-held seats, yet never seemed more than momentarily disheartened by her succession of near misses. With such toughness in the face of adversity, it was simply a matter of when, rather than if, she would find herself a constituency.
Meanwhile, I’d joined the front bench of the shadow cabinet, and was asked to prepare the first draft of the party’s international trade policy.
Liz and I worked enthusiastically together on this over several weeks.
(To my amusement, when she eventually became Trade Secretary, she was still using the phrase ‘free and fair trade’ that we had coined all those years ago.)
This project was my first exposure to Liz’s quirky approach to problem-solving and policymaking. She has always prided herself on being dismissive of the conventional, almost to the point of parody. By contrast, she is genuinely excited by the new, the untried and the untested.
She steadfastly refuses to be told what to do, but is always open to maverick ideas and proposals.
During this period, we tried to broaden each other’s minds by lending one another books. Liz’s choice for me was a well-thumbed copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the almost unreadable bible of libertarian philosophy.
Having ground my way through its 1,000 plus pages of dense print, I resolved to steer well clear of wildly impractical political theory.In return, I lent her Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, the story of reckless greed, excessive ambition and impetuous risk-taking on the Wall Street trading floor. I assume this must have been an inspiration of sorts to Liz when she became Prime Minister.
Gradually we began seeing more and more of each other and, before long, barely a day would pass without us at least speaking over the phone.
She was, I found, always exhilarating to be around. She could turn on a sixpence from being a wide-eyed wannabe, hanging on my every word, to an opinionated, stubborn and somewhat belligerent know-it-all.
Her manic energy was intoxicating, disconcerting and exhausting. Not to mention at times utterly infuriating. A friend who knew us both well remarked on the evident chemistry between us at this time – how we’d both become so much more animated when talking of each other.
But it was only at the end of 2003 that the intensity of my friendship with Liz turned into something else. Inevitably, there is something very unreal in any affair, especially when both parties are married and living with their spouses – Liz had married Hugh O’Leary, an accountant, just three years before.
The mundanities of clearing the dinner table, putting out the rubbish or even settling down together to watch television play no part in your shared existence; instead, there is the anticipation and elation of a few precious hours spent in each other’s exclusive company and the thrill that comes with never quite being sure if this is the last time.
Nevertheless, in my heart, I was painfully aware that our marriages were in very different places. Indeed, every three or four months, beset by what I took to be a mixture of guilt and indecision, Liz would try to cool things down.
I quickly worked out that the best response to this was to step back and make no attempt to contact her. Within a week or so, she would apologetically get back in touch and we would very soon be carrying on as before.
In early 2005, Liz was finally selected in the marginal Yorkshire constituency of Calder Valley and threw herself into an intense three-month general election campaign.
I travelled up there a couple of times and watched her in action, leading from the front with an utterly obsessive approach to politics that I already knew I did not have in me.
With total self-belief, she motivated her activist base. She was living, eating and breathing canvassing schedules and press relations. It was awesome to watch.
After she missed out by under 1,400 votes, she returned to London and we continued life where we had left off; she was job-hunting and I was part of George Osborne’s opposition Treasury team. An intense couple of months followed during which we saw a lot of each other.
Then Parliament went into recess and we both headed away on family holidays and, then, in my case, on two overseas delegations. This meant we could not see each other for almost two months.
I am not sure I have ever really subscribed to the theory that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I remember feeling unsettled that summer. Clarity came in September when Liz told me that she was staying with her husband.
I knew in an instant that my own marriage was over.
Liz’s marriage, however, had, and still has, endured.
Westminster is a cauldron of gossip at the best of times, so there was naturally speculation about why I had split from my wife. Liz also had her detractors. When she put herself forward as a potential candidate for the Bromley and Chislehurst by-election in 2006, someone tipped off the Daily Mail and our past relationship became public knowledge.
The story was something of a one-day wonder, not least because neither of us added oxygen by talking to the media.
But I had not reckoned with ‘the Turnip Taliban’, a phrase invented by my old friend the MP Richard Spring. He was outraged when, more than three years later, some leading figures in the South West Norfolk Conservatives revived the story in an attempt to overturn Liz’s selection.
In reality, this was never going to happen – the party leadership had invested too much in the promotion of an A-List of female and more diverse candidates.
Nevertheless, it was a deeply unpleasant baptism of fire for Liz and her family.
In 2010, she was duly elected as MP for South West Norfolk, and we became parliamentary colleagues. Our relationship was always cordial and matter-of-fact.
Neither of us would exactly go out of our way to make conversation, but nor did I ever feel any sense of awkwardness when we walked past each other or exchanged a few words in the division lobbies.
The sole exception was at a parliamentary party getaway at an Oxfordshire hotel, just before the EU referendum. People were milling around near the bar before dinner, and Liz and I got into conversation.
I teased her about her forthright public support for Remain and suggested this might owe more to her personal loyalty to Cameron and Osborne and the confident expectation that she was backing the winning side rather than her real convictions on the issue.
A snort of mock indignation greeted my insinuation that she was no more than an opportunistic careerist and we laughed away together, almost like old times, then asked each other about family and friends.
This exchange must have gone on for about five minutes when she suddenly stopped short. We both looked around and realised that quite an audience of fellow Tory MPs were listening to our animated conversation – all with slightly quizzical expressions.
Did I ever see Liz Truss as a potential Prime Minister? Well, yes and no.
In her defence, she has many of the qualities that are essential to reaching the highest rank in politics – limitless ambition and self-belief, raw intelligence, resilience and an overwhelming sense of personal destiny.
In summer 2022, after Boris’s defenestration, she became the beneficiary of the ‘anyone but Sunak’ movement.
All her years of hard graft as a party activist, association chairwoman, three-time council and parliamentary candidate now stood her in the best possible stead. She alone understood what made the ageing party membership tick, so it came as no surprise to me when she wiped the floor with Rishi Sunak.
In reality, her entire decade-long ministerial career had been an object lesson in relentlessly talking a good game – about individual freedom, smaller government, tax-cutting, economic growth and promoting market solutions – but actually delivering next to nothing.
Yet for a decade she held a succession of Cabinet roles in which she was tipped for the sack at virtually every reshuffle.
None of this would have necessarily been fatal to her prospects as Prime Minister. But she lacked the self-awareness to realise the need for trusted advisers, whose outlook would have helped temper her over-confident excesses.
Having made it to 10 Downing Street against the odds, she was determined to do it her way. In her mind, she had been pragmatic for long enough, and now no one was going to stop her.
Unfortunately, there was startlingly little to suggest that Liz had either the powers of inspirational leadership or the capacity to focus on the implementation of her policies.
No one doubted her genuine passion for theoretical policy ideas. But her grand plan to cut taxes and slash public expenditure flew in the face of the fact that the UK’s population is fast getting older and more dependent on the state.
Meanwhile, her mantra of ‘growth, growth, growth’ was never backed up by the remotest evidence of how she would implement it.
Late in August 2022, I had exchanged emails with an old friend in New York. He had first met Liz almost 20 years earlier and was incredulous that she was now only a matter of days away from becoming Prime Minister: ‘God save the UK. Liz is actually going to make it!’
In the weeks that followed, he frequently reminded me of my reply: ‘Strewth, I guess I now know how the first line of my obituary will read, but the likeliest scenario is that Liz’s tenure will be calamitous.
‘I reckon it is by no means impossible that we shall have to go through the wholeprocess of choosing a new leader again within six months.’ Six months? As it turned out, I was wildly over-optimistic.
● Adapted from The End Of An Era by Mark Field (Biteback Publishing, £25), to be published March 27. Copyright Mark Field 2025. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid to April 5; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.