As Lord Frost departed his post to be replaced by Liz Truss, I thought yet again of the impact of appearance in politics (and in most other walks of life, come to that). Frost was a beefy, broad-faced man, the kind of guy who could take care of himself in a Friday night punch-up outside the local pub. Truss, in contrast is positively girlish – blonde, slim, smiling. So can we look forward to better times as she takes over the thorny protocol problem?
Truss’s background is interesting. Her father was a professor of pure mathematics, her mother a nurse, a teacher and a CND campaigner. Both, she said, were ‘to the left of Labour’. She studied Maths and Further Maths for A Level, and she is comprehensively opposed to comprehensive schools, which she claims are “mis-selling” easy, low-value subjects in order to boost school results. And she points to the fact that comprehensive school pupils are six times as likely to take media studies at A Level as are privately educated pupils. Oh, and she’s opposed to calculators and figures they’re destroying mental arithmetic.
She went to Oxford, where she was President of the Oxford Lib Dems. (Yes, seriously) and studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) as so many toffs do. She has co-authored a book with the wonderful title Britannia Unchained, in which is to be found the famous statement: ‘Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world’. She founded the Free Enterprise Group of Conservative MPs, which consists of a collection of MPs who are in favour of an ‘entrepreneurial economy’ and want fewer employment laws.
I could go on to point out that while media studies is the favourite whipping-boy of right-wing educationalists, it’s also the only way we’ll get a systematic insight into how the media shape our thinking. I could also point out that being opposed to machines which can add stuff up far more accurately than any human is like being in favour of a scythe rather than an electric lawn-mower. Or I could point out that protection of workers’ rights is good business as well as an ethical approach to those who work.
But I’ll just give a gentle heads-up: this woman is to the right of Frost, to the right of Johnson and probably to the right of Thatcher. And she’s said to have her eye on succeeding Johnson. Now there’s a happy thought to hug as we go towards a new year.
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