Desk Report :

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.
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.
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.
David Cameron, who became Conservative leader in 2005, always gave me the impression that he had been untouched by modesty or doubt from a very early age.
He reputedly divided colleagues into two classes, team players and w*****s. I was never under any illusions as to which of these categories he had me down for.
While I was essentially a moderniser and recognised his ideas would be popular with the many metropolitan professionals living in the Westminster constituency, they always struck me at their heart as inauthentic.
For George Osborne, politics was only ever about power: where to find it and how to exercise it. Not really about ideology, nor even any burning sense of public service, although perhaps I am being a little unfair on that point. I came to respect his professionalism and work rate.
However, from the very first time we met, I never quite got over the feeling that had Osborne been only two or three years younger, he might easily have come under the spell of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, with whom he had so much in common.
I suspect that in this parallel version of reality, our George might well have become a leading figure in New Labour’s younger generation.
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.
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.
News : Daily Mail