The details of the affair, part of a serialisation of Field’s forthcoming memoir The End of an Era, appeared in the Mail on Sunday last weekend. Up until now the former minister of state for Asia and the Pacific was probably best known for grabbing a Greenpeace protester by the neck in 2019. But it would appear he has now, thanks to our 49-day prime minister, found a new claim to fame.
And it appears that it was Truss who tended to abandon him along the way – and once and for all, as he describes: “Clarity came in September when Liz told me that she was staying with her husband.”
Women already have to fight to be taken seriously in Westminster. Can you imagine that infamous front page, “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!” – written about Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon – being about two male politicians? Or a female MP being re-elected after lying horizontal across the front bench of the Commons during a Brexit debate, as Jacob Rees-Mogg was? Women in Westminster can’t afford to make mistakes like that.
Certainly, it’s hard to imagine a woman would include the gratuitous, patronising little asides about their former sexual partner with which Field sprinkles his piece. The direction of the party is close to Liz’s heart “as, unlike me, she is not yet an MP”. In a pretence at modesty, Field brackets the anecdote: “To my amusement, when she eventually became Trade Secretary, she was still using the phrase ‘free and fair trade’ that we had coined all those years ago.”
Tory MPs claimed that Angela Rayner was attempting to compete with Boris Johnson’s “Oxford Union debating training” during PMQs by crossing and uncrossing her legs. Nadine Dorries’s political loyalty to Johnson, meanwhile, supposedly arose from being in love with him. (It was always women at fault, never Boris Johnson.)
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Often, women in politics are only given full agency in the role of sirens, who lure men to their fate. Field’s piece is introduced with “Tory minister whose marriage was destroyed by former prime minister” – it’s hard to imagine a male politician being blamed for the destruction of the marriage of a woman he had an affair with. Field says Truss’s “manic energy was intoxicating, disconcerting and exhausting” – the implication, at best, is that she is a force to be reckoned with, somehow defying her feminine fate by acceding to high office.
But there are few precedents for infidelity bringing down male politicians. You wouldn’t know where to start with male politicians who suffered barely a dent in their careers for their unfaithfulness: John Prescott and Boris Johnson for starters. And would a female MP bounce back from CCTV footage of an extramarital tryst and go straight into the I’m a Celebrity… jungle for a massive fee, like Matt Hancock?
In many ways, what Field has done is unsurprising. Men, from Martin Amis to Ernest Hemingway, so often write of their affairs with a tone of nostalgia tinged with a little regret. They can romanticise themselves as gallant men following their impulses.
Look, I didn’t expect to be getting up and defending Liz Truss today either. She crashed the pound and sent mortgage rates spiralling in only her second month in office. But those crimes are enough, and speak for themselves – we don’t need to undermine her for an affair that took place 20 years ago and which she has taken accountability for. Not if we would never do so for a man in her place.
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