Truss takes over the Brexit brief After Lord Frost ended his colourful time as Brexit Secretary, the question became who was Johnson going to hand the job to next. In the end, he decided to give it to Liz Truss, rolling it up into her FCO brief. There has been some speculation that in doing this, Boris Johnson has handed Truss a “poisoned chalice”. I think the best way to evaluate whether this is true or not is to look at past Brexit Secretaries and see what happened to them. If the brief really is “poisoned”, a sort of graveyard of political careers as it were, this should be reflected in the fates of the previous post holders. So, the first one was David Davis - actually, the initial Brexit Secretary was Oliver Letwin, but he was in situ for a couple of weeks only and I don’t think really counts for a variety of reasons. Davis managed to emerge from the post with no damage whatsoever being done to his political standing amongst Brexiteers. In fact, I have never come across a single soul who blames Davis for where Brexit had come to under his watch - all of the blame accrued solely to Theresa May.
This week in Brexitland, December 24, 2021
This week in Brexitland, December 24, 2021
This week in Brexitland, December 24, 2021
Truss takes over the Brexit brief After Lord Frost ended his colourful time as Brexit Secretary, the question became who was Johnson going to hand the job to next. In the end, he decided to give it to Liz Truss, rolling it up into her FCO brief. There has been some speculation that in doing this, Boris Johnson has handed Truss a “poisoned chalice”. I think the best way to evaluate whether this is true or not is to look at past Brexit Secretaries and see what happened to them. If the brief really is “poisoned”, a sort of graveyard of political careers as it were, this should be reflected in the fates of the previous post holders. So, the first one was David Davis - actually, the initial Brexit Secretary was Oliver Letwin, but he was in situ for a couple of weeks only and I don’t think really counts for a variety of reasons. Davis managed to emerge from the post with no damage whatsoever being done to his political standing amongst Brexiteers. In fact, I have never come across a single soul who blames Davis for where Brexit had come to under his watch - all of the blame accrued solely to Theresa May.