A former Conservative MP has detailed his love affair with the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister Liz Truss – claiming it led to the breakdown of his marriage.
Mark Field, MP for Cities of London and Westminster from 2001 to 2019, revealed the “first serious signs of cracks” in his marriage began “just as Elizabeth Truss entered his life”.
In his new book serialised in the Mail on Sunday, Mr Field said he met the 49-day prime minister at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2002 in the “romantic dimmed lights” of the Highcliff Hotel in Bournemouth. She was married to Hugh O’Leary at the time.
He claims the pair had a brief conversation, he wished her luck in her search for a parliamentary seat and casually said, “Please get in touch if I can be of any help.”
Ms Truss took him up on the offer almost immediately, he wrote, requesting advice on candidate selection.
As they began meeting regularly, Mr Field said she was “an impulsive bundle of energy, obsessed by the workings and machinations of politics.” He recalled that “even then, Liz came across” as intensely focused on success, displaying “the parroting of slogans, the blind partisanship and the need to present it all with a veneer of absolute confidence.”
As they worked together, they spent more and more time in each other’s company, he wrote. “Before long, barely a day would pass without us at least speaking over the phone.”
He said he found her “intoxicating, disconcerting and exhausting. Not to mention at times utterly infuriating.”
Their “intensity of friendship” had become an affair in late 2003, he said.
“There is something very unreal in any affair, especially when both parties are married and living with their spouses,” Mr Field wrote.
He said every few months, Ms Truss would try to “cool things down” but would always “apologetically get back in touch” soon after.
Ms Truss was selected as the Conservative candidate for Calder Valley in early 2005, and Mr Field observed her campaign closely, admiring her “utterly obsessive approach to politics.”
When their affair eventually ended in 2006, Field immediately recognised that “my own marriage was over”. Ms Truss, however, remained with her husband. Their relationship became public knowledge that year when she stood as a candidate for the Bromley and Chislehurst by-election.
Reflecting on her rise to prime minister, he said Ms Trus had “limitless ambition and self-belief, raw intelligence, resilience and an overwhelming sense of personal destiny.”
However, he argued that “her entire decade-long ministerial career had been an object lesson in relentlessly talking a good game… but actually delivering next to nothing”.
“Having made it to 10 Downing Street against the odds, she was determined to do it her way,” he said.
He believed that her downfall stemmed from “startlingly little to suggest that Liz had either the powers of inspirational leadership or the capacity to focus on the implementation of her policies”.
