FROM CHEVENING TO CHEQUERS. FOR ME, two weekends, eight weeks apart, will forever bookend my friend Liz Truss’s time as prime minister. The first, a wash of August Bank Holiday sunshine over the Kent countryside. Walking the grounds of the Foreign Secretary’s home with her on one of the last days of a leadership contest she had already won, listening as she outlined her vision for government, stalking ahead impatiently through the yellowing grass.
The second, an October Sunday in Buckinghamshire, an afternoon of bruised clouds and close heat foreshadowing the storm which broke as we dispersed. A small circle of family, ministers and aides, gathered in the Great Hall to say goodbye. A day defined by the quiet dignity and absence of self-pity of its principal protagonist, entirely typical of our host.
These memories are appropriate, because so much of what happened in between was decided at Chevening in the dog days of August. That is the conclusion, correctly, of James Heale and Harry Cole’s Out of the Blue, a brisk and insightful canter through Liz’s career and the forces that shaped her. It was those weeks at Chevening immediately prior to her becoming prime minister that truly mattered to the fate of her premiership.
This is journalism as the first draft of history. In
