In the role, she took on the controversial task of trying to overhaul differences with Brussels about post-Brexit trade in Northern Ireland. Like Johnson, she has talked tough on Russia and given unswerving backing for Ukraine.
Truss’s dress sense and photo opportunities — posing in a tank in Estonia and wearing a fur hat in Moscow — have earned her comparisons to Tory icon Margaret Thatcher. Her sometimes stiff style has become visibly more relaxed and allies have sought to soften her image, revealing her love of karaoke and socializing.
- Establishment elite?
“For a party that’s gone in quite a populist direction in recent years, she’s been able to present herself as more authentic, more ordinary than Rishi Sunak, who is all too easily presented as part of the global elite,” said Tim Bale, from the Queen Mary University of London. “Like Boris Johnson, she is keen on the idea that there is some kind of elite that has to be countered and she sets herself up as being outside the establishment, despite having been in government for eight years.”
Sunak, 42, the grandson of Indian immigrants, grew up as the son of a doctor and a pharmacist in Southampton, on England’s south coast. He attended the prestigious fee-paying Winchester College school, then Oxford University. Truss, who went to a state school in Leeds, northern England, also studied at Oxford. Both studied politics, philosophy, and economics.
Sunak met his wife, Akshata Murty, whose father founded the Indian tech giant Infosys, at US university Stanford before jobs at Goldman Sachs and investment funds. He has represented the constituency of Richmond in northern England since 2015, where he was soon marked out as a potential future prime minister. He became finance minister in early 2020, quickly winning plaudits for spearheading government support for people and businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
But Sunak, a self-confessed geek with a love of Star Wars, saw opinion turn against him this year after it emerged that his wife did not pay UK tax. Critics have also used his private wealth, expensive clothes, and houses to portray him as out of touch with the ordinary public.
