Peaceful side streets, rows of villas in blond Yorkshire stone, a vast school establishment hidden in the greenery, a few neat pubs… To the north of Leeds, the Roundhay district contrasts pleasantly with the rest of this metropolis in the North East of England, a former textile capital that has become an active, but charmless, commercial and university centre.
It is in this bourgeois enclave that the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mary Elizabeth Truss, 47, the new British Prime Minister, elected by the members at the head of the Conservative Party, Monday September 5 – she will be appointed to Downing Street by the Queen Elizabeth II, Tuesday – passed her teenage years. A studious student, the third woman – and third conservative – in this post, after Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, attended the Roundhay School, a reputable public establishment, before landing a place at Oxford University, option PPE (politics, philosophy, economy), the royal way to frequent the alleys of power.
In July, at the start of the Conservative Party primary caused by the fall of Boris Johnson, pushed to the exit by his own deputies, following the “partygate”, Liz Truss said that she had been educated “in the heart of the red wall” (the north of England, renowned for its impoverished areas) and that she had met students there ” that [son] school dropped out. These remarks did not go down well, the local media reporting the outraged reactions of residents claiming that their neighborhood had nothing underprivileged.
Full right campaign
Passing through Leeds on July 28 to participate in the first public debate opposing her to the ex-chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss again summoned these disputed memories. A way for this political leader, blonde square and ivory skin, follower of power dresses and very high heels, to refine a provincial “anti-establishment” image; a real “Yorkshire girl”, as she likes to point out, which would take from this region “great determination and the habit of speaking the truth”. ‘This is what we need in Downing Street in these times of crisis, someone who is bold, who rejects the status quo’she added, in Leeds.
Liz Truss, however, settled in Greenwich years ago, a privileged area of south-east London. She comes from a middle-class family: her father, John, a university mathematics professor, and her mother, Priscilla, a left-wing activist nurse, met on the benches of the prestigious University of Cambridge. . But her small departures from reality did not harm her with members of the Conservative Party, who had to choose between her and Mr. Sunak.
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