Just as with the outgoing Alexander Boris de Pfeffel, there is an immediate clue that all might not be as it seems with Mary Truss.

She has gone by her middle name Elizabeth since a young age, eventually whittling it down to the snappy sobriquet her image is crafted around: Liz.

Only she knows how deliberate this rebranding was but the fact she chose to go by Elizabeth early on in her Commons career suggests some thought has gone into it along the way.

This detail wouldn’t mean much if it didn’t speak to a wider impression that emerges from her biography, that of a political shapeshifter who has carefully curated her image and painstakingly planned her route to power for decades.

She herself describes her evolution as a ‘political journey’. That is putting it mildly. 

Here’s the short version: from Liberal Democrat to Tory; from middling minister to party big beast; from Cameroon moderniser to darling of the right; and from committed Remainer to Brexit champion.

Not too long ago, she was best known for her infamous ‘pork markets’ speech and only ever mentioned as a rogue outsider in future leadership discussions.

But that does a disservice to what has been a studiously plotted and almost flawlessly executed rise, one which has taken her to the very gates of Downing Street.

How she got there reveals some fundamental truths about her character and the direction she intends to take the country in.

Today she was officially named the next leader of the Conservatives by beating Rishi Sunak by 21,000 votes.

Beginnings

Ms Truss’ itinerant childhood meant she didn’t have a ‘hometown’ until she was at secondary school.

Born in 1975 in Oxford to a mathematics professor and a nurse, the family went where her father’s teaching career took them. Spells in Kidderminister, Canada and Paisley followed before they put down roots in Leeds.

Here she attended, in her words, a ‘poor’ comprehensive school which ‘let down’ its pupils. Former classmates have accused her of talking down her alma mater to flesh out her backstory.

She returned to Oxford for university and threw herself into student politics while studying PPE, a primer course for would-be prime ministers (she is set to become the fourth it has produced).

By now, young Elizabeth’s politics were already to the right of her left-wing, CND-supporting parents but they still shared an anti-establishment bent and her views were rooted in the conversations they shared around the dinner table. 

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She joined the Liberal Democrats. It seemed to provide a home for her burgeoning interest in laissez faire economic and social politics and, as a girl from a Labour household, would prove a useful halfway house before fully crossing the Rubicon.

Her organisational skills were already on display and she soon became president of the party’s university branch on a pro-cannabis legalisation and anti-monarchy platform.

By the end of her studies, her love affair with liberal theory had gone beyond the fluffier fringes of the Lib Dem world and her political ambitions had outgrown a party which held only 20 seats.

By 1996, she had formally switched allegiance to the Conservatives and, though corporate jobs at big firms like Shell followed, her mind was clearly already made up: she’d be an MP.

Politics

Her first attempt to break into politics came in 2001 aged just 25 but she was trounced by 15,000 votes in Hemsworth, then a safe Labour seat.

A second effort in Calder Valley followed four years later, where she lost by just 1,400 votes, ironically denied victory in part because of Lib Dem gains.

She would have to make do with council seats around London in the meantime but she had caught the attention of Tory leader David Cameron, who was on a drive to make the party younger and more diverse.

She was parachuted into the safe seat of South West Norfolk in 2010, although her career almost ended before it got going when it emerged she had previously had an affair with Mark Field, a married then-Tory MP.

Local members tried to reverse her selection but she survived (as did her marriage to accountant Hugh O’Leary, with whom she has two teenage daughters, Frances and Liberty).

She didn’t stand out immediately. Among a crowded field of future cabinet high flyers, a BBC ‘end of term report’ for new MPs published a year after the general election didn’t even mention her.

But out of sight, she was making a name for herself, including by establishing a backbench group to lobby for free market, low tax policies and co-authoring Britannia Unchained, a rallying cry for the economic right of the Tory party.

She says a notorious line contained in one its chapters calling UK workers ‘the worst idlers in the world’ was penned by Dominic Raab. He insists she signed off on it.

Minister

Liz Truss is a political survivor.

Through three administrations and the turmoil of the Brexit years, she has not been without a government job since being handed a junior education role in 2012.

Two years later, she was in charge of the environment department, a job in which she gave a conference speech that still haunts her.

Glancing down at notes, she beamed awkwardly at the prospect of ‘opening new pork markets’ in China, while her demeanour darkened theatrically as she fumed over the amount of cheese the UK imports.

A former aide told the BBC that to this day, she draws the line at being teased over that speech.

When the European Union referendum rolled around, there was little doubt about which side of the divide an ex-Lib Dem with a careerist instinct was going to end up on.

She was an unequivocal Remainer and though never a leading light in the campaign, she was on hand to extoll the virtues of bloc membership when called upon.

When Theresa May took power, she survived the cabinet shake-up and became justice secretary, a period which gave her a higher profile but was not without controversy.

After her departure, the country’s most senior judge accused her of failing to protect the judiciary when the Daily Mail branded them ‘enemies of the people’.

She was demoted in 2017 to a junior Treasury role but her fortunes were again on the rise when Mr Johnson took over, rewarded for being one of the first senior figures to back his leadership bid – though not before publicly floating her own intention to stand.

As his international trade secretary, it would be her name on the post-Brexit trade agreements (big or small) and crucially, she was able to woo the wing of the party she had been at odds with just a few years before.

She was promoted to foreign secretary amid speculation that the PM was concerned about the seemingly irresistible momentum behind his chancellor Rishi Sunak and keen to create another powerbase at the top of his cabinet to ward off a challenge from Number 11.

Ms Truss was praised by colleagues for her tough stance on Russia but accused by some of naivety when she traveled to Moscow for a meeting with Vladimir Putin’s top diplomat, who angrily barracked her in front of the cameras and lied to her face about the Kremlin’s plans for the troops then still massed on Ukraine’s border.

The somewhat costume box fur coat and hat she wore for pictures in Red Square on the same trip also prompted a familiar line of criticism about her being overly image conscious or, more harshly, style over substance (unlike her tech-averse predecessors, she is a prolific user of social media).

Candidate

Ms Truss stood by the PM as his government collapsed but behind the scenes her aides were busy preparing the ground for a leadership campaign, buoyed by her newfound popularity with members as the anti-Putin, new Iron Lady.

She coasted through the early stages of the contest despite lukewarm backing from MPs and went on to dominate the race with a three-pronged strategy. 

First, she cemented her appeal with the Tory faithful, aligning herself with the enduringly popular Mr Johnson and throwing them red meat on pet issues.

Second, she put clear blue water between herself and Mr Sunak, painting him as part of a privileged elite and trashing his economic record on tax rises – ones, lest we forget, she agreed to and voted for.

Third, she completed her Brexit U-turn by offering a full mea culpa to the anti-EU wing of the party, telling them: ‘I was wrong and I am prepared to admit I was wrong’.

It was a reversal that was enough to win the backing of figures like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Iain Duncan Smith at the expense of Mr Sunak, a lifelong Leaver who tanked his own chances of an early elevation to the cabinet under Mr Cameron by backing Brexit.

Prime minister?

In a Politico interview conducted after she became foreign secretary, Ms Truss said ‘I’m probably one of the more ideological among my colleagues’, a statement it’s hard to imagine either of the three previous Tory prime ministers making.

Ideology has been out of fashion in British politics for some time but its role in Ms Truss’ personal politics goes back to the parents who’d take her on marches in the turbulent late 1980s and her university search for her own political home.

Any suggestion that her positions are predicated on tactical convenience alone wilfully ignores a decades-long commitment to free market liberalism which links her leadership campaign to her teenage years.

Through the Lib Dem defection and the Brexit conversion, those beliefs have been ever-present, even if she’s demonstrated a willingness to shelve them in order to retain a seat at the cabinet table.

Now those beliefs are in plain sight.

Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, she said it was ‘wrong’ to view economics purely through the lens of wealth redistribution and didn’t flinch when shown a graph depicting how her National Insurance policy would barely help the poor while putting money in the pockets of the rich.

Make no mistake, Ms Truss intends to instigate a paradigm shift in the way the Treasury does business. 

And while we can expect a healthy dose of Boris Johsnon-style boosterism, being an ideologue is as much about saying what you won’t do as what you will – and that is where she will be tested.

Within days, she has vowed to set out how her government will tackle the biggest cost of living crisis in a generation, backed by a cabinet who, if reports are to be believed, will be stocked with right-wingers who share her faith in the healing powers of tax cuts and small government.

She will be under immediate pressure not to reach for the big red button marked ‘spend’ by those around her and she has already indicated there’ll be no ‘handouts’.

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Neither, though, will there be any handouts for her. No honeymoon, no grace period, no free hit.

Ever since flying her parents’ political nest as a teenager, she has been guided by a core set of economic convictions – now she must prove to herself and the country that her diagnosis was right all along.

Britain faces a long, hard winter from which much will emerge tattered and scarred. 

If the medicine she has prescribed does not have the desired effect, the political triumph she has made it her life’s work to secure will be one of them.

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