The human hand grenade

You can tell a lot about a minister from their bookshelves. Some display photos of themselves with the great and the good, others favour wonky texts. As you walk into Elizabeth Truss’s seventh-floor office in the Department of Education, the first thing you see is a think-tank pamphlet: ‘The Profit Motive in Education: Continuing the Revolution’.

Knowing Truss, I half expect she put it there to provoke; a symbol of her radicalism. She grew up in a left-wing household and says, ‘My first political experience was going on a CND march, which taught me a certain political style.’

I’ve heard her nickname in the department is the human hand grenade. When I ask why, her response shows the hand grenade in action.

‘Well, there are two civil servants in this meeting,’ she says, turning to the press officers with us. ‘Maybe they can elucidate?’ One looks uncomfortable and says: ‘I’m not being interviewed!’ ‘That’s a Jeremy Paxman-style answer,’ says Truss and turns to the other, who says quietly, ‘I’ll leave it to you.’

‘Maybe,’ she says, ‘it’s because I put civil servants on the spot.’

Truss won the minister to watch at the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year awards last week, and she talks about the problems facing the country in a more direct manner than most new ministers dare to. She attributes Britain’s failure to compete globally to the poor skills of people here. She warns that ‘the proportion of our population who don’t have basic skills is very high in comparison with other countries’. This is a ‘culture and an education problem’, she says.

Her views on this issue date back to a year she spent in Canada when she was 12. ‘The whole culture was people wanting to do well and succeed.