Is there something refreshing about former Conservative MP Mark Field’s tell-all about the 18-month affair he had with Liz Truss, while they were both married? In recent years, it’s been women like Jennifer Arcuri (Boris Johnson) and Stormy Daniels (Donald Trump) who have bared all on their entanglements with leading men.
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.
All of which is very interesting, and I too enjoyed the details. Their affair was one of minds: in return for Truss lending him Ayn Rand, Field “lent her Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, the story of reckless greed, excessive ambition and impetuous risk-taking on the Wall Street trading floor. I assume this must have been an inspiration of sorts to Liz when she became Prime Minister.”
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.”
But let’s step back for a second and think about what is really going on here. Because let’s face it, very few women in politics would dare write such a piece about their sexual history, certainly no former MP.
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.
Since former health minister Edwina Currie’s revelation in 2002 of her affair with John Major, few woman in politics have dared disclose such indiscretions. She became a punchline in jokes for years. Of the revelations, Lady Archer, wife of the disgraced Tory peer, said “I am a little surprised, not at Mrs Currie’s indiscretion but at a temporary lapse in John Major’s taste.” Major, meanwhile, managed to maintain his statesmanlike reputation.
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.”
Female politicos are already fighting the assumption they are primarily sexual beings. Charlotte Owens, the youngest peer to join the House of Lords, was beset with a slew of innuendo as to why she was selected by Boris Johnson – despite the fact her contributions were enough to put her in the top 10 per cent of speakers in the Lords in general. The fusty male majority of the House received scant criticism in comparison.
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.)
square SIMON KELNER
So now we know that Liz Truss is not the worst person in politics
Read MoreOften, 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.
It is telling, too, that it is Liz Truss who already suffered from public knowledge of this affair. In 2009, local Conservative Party members nearly managed to oust her from her seat upon learning of her past affair. They were concerned about the fact she had not disclosed her affair upon being selected by the local Conservative Association.
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?
People disapproved of Edwina Currie more than John Major after she revealed their affair, according to polling at the time – despite the fact Major had pushed a Back to Basics campaign advocating for family values when he was PM. Truss’s conservatism, in fairness, is primarily around free markets and railing against the establishment (whatever that is). Family values was never a platform she ran on.
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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