Liz Truss’s former Oxford professor has spilled the beans on Boris Johnson’s likely successor, saying she has an unwavering ability to shift from one fiercely held belief to another.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Mark Stears said Truss’s rise to pole position in the Tory leadership race has taken everyone by surprise in his faculty.
“Sometimes, my colleagues and I would while away the hours trying to work out which of our students might be the cabinet ministers of tomorrow”, he said.
“To us, the future seemed to belong to the technocrats. Clean-cut competence and crystal-clear coherence were the virtues in vogue.
“And that wasn’t what most characterised Truss then, any more than it is now.”
Stears said Truss had an ability to “unblinkingly” shift from one fiercely held belief to another, characteristics that might explain how she moved from being a Lib Dem and a Remainer to espousing seemingly conflicting political beliefs.
Most recently, he says, Truss has been “magicking up a money tree” and “promising immediate tax cuts” that “place her at odds not just with conventional economists but of the vast majority of heterodox ones too”.
Indeed, Patrick Minford appears to be a lone ranger in supporting Truss’s policies, an economist who has been widely discredited over the years.
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