Who is Liz Truss? Ambitious Thatcher fan on cusp of power in the UK

UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is widely expected to win the Conservative Party leadership ballot next week and become Britain’s new prime minister. One person who may not be cheering is her dad.

Truss is reported to have a strained relationship with her father John Truss, a prominent mathematics professor, whose left-wing political views run counter to those of his 47-year-old daughter.

In the 1980s, Truss’ father and mother brought her along on nuclear disarmament marches. Both parents were bitterly opposed to then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” who led Britain from 1979 to 1990.

Truss, who has led rival Rishi Sunak in polls of Tory members to take over from scandal-hit Boris Johnson, claims to embody the values of Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister.

Truss would be the third woman to lead at Number 10 Downing Street.

“She’s ‘ambition personified’ and an ideologue at the same time, and it’s an explosive combination,” Christopher Painter, an emeritus professor in public policy and management at the University of Birmingham, said of Truss.

“The ideology is leading her down a path that is totally inappropriate for the dire situation the country is facing.”