Liz Truss on taking on Sunak and what she'll do in No. 10

As cabinet members were lining up last week to tell Boris Johnson to resign, one major actor was absent from the drama. Liz Truss was in Indonesia at a G20 summit and missed the fun. She flew back the day after Johnson announced his resignation, knowing that if she makes it to the final stage of the leadership campaign, she has a very good chance of becoming the next prime minister.

She is the longest-serving cabinet member, having been environment minister, Lord Chancellor, a treasury minister, trade secretary and now Foreign Secretary. To her admirers, she’s a ‘true blue’ Tory who can inspire a following with her brand of liberty-loving conservatism. She loves the party base, who in turn seem to love her. Her speeches at party conference often have large queues on the way in and she has been voted Tory activists’ favourite more times than any other minister in the Johnson era.

Her critics says she is a populist, a ‘human hand grenade’ and a political lightweight whose love of Instagram exposes her as unserious. ‘If Truss is the answer, we’re asking the wrong question,’ says one former minister. Her detractors – most commonly One Nation Tories – take an ‘anyone but Truss’ stance on the leadership. ‘But colleagues will see her creativity and grip of policy – and she is absolutely relentless,’ says one admirer. ‘Once something gets into her head as needing to be done she never lets it go. What’s the difference between Liz and a rottweiler? The rottweiler eventually lets go.’

I met Truss on a trip to Paris earlier this month, in relatively tranquil days when there were few signs that Johnson was about to implode. Her message to the French during the trip – her first since she became foreign secretary last year – was a plea to get the ‘barnacles off the boat’ by sorting the Northern Ireland Protocol.