The next Thatcher ... or the next Theresa May? Liz Truss contends for UK PM

At the age of nine, Liz Truss played Margaret Thatcher in a school play.

But unlike the Conservative prime minister, who won a huge majority in that year's general election, she did not prove a success.

The production included a mock election and, in 2018, Truss recalled: "I jumped at the chance and gave a heartfelt speech at the hustings, but ended up with zero votes. I didn't even vote for myself."

Thirty-nine years later, she is jumping at the chance to follow the Iron Lady's lead for real and become Conservative leader and prime minister.

The foreign secretary is locked in a battle with former Chancellor Rishi Sunak that is set to last throughout the summer.

* Read more: Who is Rishi Sunak?

Bookmakers have Truss as the marginal favourite to win the contest, having spent years building relationships with constituency associations and remained loyal to Boris Johnson during the darkest days of his premiership.

But, in many ways, she is not a conventional Tory.

Mary Elizabeth Truss was born in Oxford in 1975. She has described her father, a mathematics professor, and her mother, a nurse, as "left-wing".

As a young girl, her mother took on marches for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, an organisation vehemently opposed to the Thatcher government's decision to allow US nuclear warheads to be installed at RAF Greenham Common, west of London.

Cluedo memories

The family moved to Paisley, just west of Glasgow, when Truss was four years old.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Profile, her younger brother said the family had enjoyed playing board games such as Cluedo and Monopoly, but that the young Truss hated losing and would often disappear rather than risk not winning.

The family later decamped to Leeds, where she attended Roundhay, a state secondary school. She has described seeing "children who failed and were let down by low expectations" during her time there.

Some of Truss's contemporaries and near contemporaries at Roundhay have disputed her account of the school, including Guardian journalist Martin Pengelly, who wrote: "Perhaps she is selectively deploying her upbringing, and casually traducing the school and teachers who nurtured her, for simple political gain."

Whatever her schooling, Truss got to Oxford University, where she read philosophy, politics and economics and was active in student politics, initially for the Liberal Democrats.

At the party's 1994 conference, she spoke in favour of abolishing the Monarchy, telling delegates in Brighton: "We Liberal Democrats believe in opportunity for all. We do not believe people who are born to rule."

Westminster ambitions

During her time at Oxford, Truss switched from the Lib Dems to the Conservatives.

After graduating she worked as an accountant for Shell, and Cable & Wireless, and married fellow accountant Hugh O'Leary in 2000. The couple have two children.

Truss stood as the Tory candidate for Hemsworth, West Yorkshire, in the 2001 general election, but lost. Truss suffered another defeat in Calder Valley, also in West Yorkshire, at the 2005 election.

But, her political ambitions undimmed, she was elected as a councillor in Greenwich, south-east London, in 2006, and from 2008 also worked as deputy director of the right-of-centre Reform think tank.

Conservative leader David Cameron put Truss on his "A-list" of priority candidates for the 2010 election and she was selected to run the safe seat of South West Norfolk, which she won by more than 13,000 votes.

However, in 2012, she faced a battle against de-selection by the constituency Tory association, after it was revealed she had had an affair with Tory MP Mark Field five years earlier.

The critics, dubbed the "turnip Taliban" in the media, failed, while Truss's career flourished.

She co-authored a book called Britannia Unchained, which recommended stripping back state regulation to boost the UK's position in the world, marking her out as a prominent advocate of free market policies on the Tory benches.

In September 2012, just over two years after becoming an MP, she entered government as an education minister.

She clashed with Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg over schools reform, but Cameron, now prime minister, promoted her to the cabinet in 2014, as environment secretary.

At the 2015 Conservative conference, Truss was mocked for a speech in which she said, in an impassioned voice: "We import two-thirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace."

Brexit U-turn

Less than a year later came arguably the biggest political event in a generation - the EU referendum.

Truss campaigned for Remain, writing in the Sun newspaper that Brexit would be "a triple tragedy - more rules, more forms and more delays when selling to the EU".

However, after her side lost, she changed her mind, arguing that Brexit provided an opportunity to "shake up the way things work" in the UK.

In 2016, she became justice secretary under Theresa May, the following year moving on to become chief secretary to the Treasury, a position at the heart of the government's economic programme.

After Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, Truss was moved to international trade secretary - a job which meant meeting global political and business leaders to promote UK PLC.

In 2021, aged 46, she moved to one of the most senior jobs in government, taking over as foreign secretary when Johnson moved Dominic Raab to justice secretary.

In this role she has sought to solve the knotty problem of the Northern Ireland Protocol, by scrapping parts of a post-Brexit EU-UK deal - a move the EU fiercely criticised.

She secured the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori from Iran - two British-Iranian nationals who had both been arrested and detained.

And when Russia invaded Ukraine in February she took a hard line, insisting all of Vladimir Putin's forces should be driven from the country.

But she faced criticism after expressing support for individuals from the UK who might want to go to Ukraine to fight.

On a visit to Russia in February, just prior to the Ukraine war starting, Truss wore a round fur hat which observers likened to one sported by Thatcher during a trip to a Nato training camp in 1986.

Having joined the Tory leadership contest, during one of the TV debates she wore a large white bow, also similar to that once favoured by the former prime minister.

So was there some deliberate messaging going on as she made her bid to become only the third female PM in UK history?

"It is quite frustrating that female politicians always get compared to Margaret Thatcher while male politicians don't get compared to Ted Heath," Truss told GB News.

But such comparisons are not, perhaps, an obvious disadvantage when it comes to garnering support from around 160,000 Conservative Party members.

- BBC