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From being mocked for her outrage about cheese imports to being appointed to one of the great offices of state, Liz Truss has made a steady rise up the Cabinet ladder.
Promoted by the Prime Minister to Foreign Secretary during his top-team reshuffle, Ms Truss has been rewarded after being seen to have made a success of her international trade secretary post.
While the Government faced tough headlines about deadlock in the negotiations with the European Union during the Brexit transition period, the South West Norfolk MP made steady work of rolling over a host of trade deals for the UK, ensuring the terms agreed while an EU member were ready to continue after exiting the bloc.
A much-coveted trade deal with the US might have eluded her, but the 46-year-old won plaudits in the Conservative Party for securing new terms with Japan and Australia, while a New Zealand agreement is said to be nearing completion.
To secure the terms with Canberra, Ms Truss’s free-trade beliefs were said to have won out against the protectionism instincts of other ministers, such as Environment Secretary George Eustice, especially when it came to food imports.
Her Labour critics, however, bemoan that the Cabinet minister did not deliver a “single trade deal that we didn’t already have inside the EU”, calling the praise within Government for her performance overblown.
With Dominic Raab removed from the Foreign Office after his botched handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, Boris Johnson has turned to a trusted ally in his latest reshuffle.
Pork
Infamously, the worlds of social media and politics combined in 2014, when her improbably enthusiastic speech about opening pork markets in Beijing went viral, pilloried on satirical programmes such as Have I Got News For You?
She caused further hilarity when telling the Tory Party conference that year: “We import two-thirds of our cheese, that is a disgrace.”
The sentence was accompanied by a wide grin from Truss, who clearly expected applause, but it came a little too late.
And so, an awkward meme was born.
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