Can Liz Truss survive the coming storm?

She has been a minister for a decade and at the cabinet table for eight years, but it is still hard to predict what she will do in the top job, writes John Rentoul

Liz Truss enters 10 Downing Street at a difficult time for the UK economy (AP)

For someone who has the most cabinet experience of any new Conservative prime minister since Alec Douglas-Home, Liz Truss remains something of an enigma. The other day, I looked her up in all the memoirs, diaries and instant histories covering the past 10 years of British politics that I could find. The mark she has left on these early drafts of history is light indeed.

One of the most colourful accounts is of her two years as a junior minister in the Department for Education, recorded by David Laws, a Liberal Democrat minister in the same department. Apart from impressing him with her ambition, energy and resemblance to Margaret Thatcher, she left no legacy to speak of.

The main excitement of that period was a clash between Ms Truss and Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, over nursery schools, which she boasted about in the final hustings in London last week. In 2013, she wanted to “allow nurseries to have much worse ratios of staff to children, even though the consultation showed this is mind-bogglingly unpopular”, Mr Laws wrote. “Liz is ‘not for turning’.”