Before going to an open day for a sixth form college, I’d made a number of promises to my daughter, H, in respect of how fundamentally embarrassing it is to go anywhere with me. I wouldn’t ask any questions. I would try not to fall into conversation with anyone. I definitely wouldn’t interrogate any young people, even if they were standing in a classroom wearing a badge that said “Ask me anything about A-level biology”. In the unlikely event that any other parent asked me if I worked at the Guardian, I’d say, “What’s a guardian?” I would, in short, keep myself to myself.
That went pretty well for 25 minutes – until I spied a figure in the maths corridor and exploded in the world’s loudest stage whisper. “H, H, H, that’s Liz Truss.” She was heading, also with her daughter, past a room marked Further Mathematics, and it seemed to me the most important thing in the world that I get a photo. Not to put it on social media! Just to amuse one, maybe two of my friends.
H, whose non-verbal communication game has always been incredibly strong, managed to get across to me with her eyes that she did not want to chase Liz Truss. A teacher also gave me a stern look. I put my phone back in my pocket. H disappeared like smoke. So now I went, on my own, into the further maths classroom, which is of itself an incredibly questionable situation if you don’t have a kid with you.
I was also, in a reversal of fortunes, now hiding from Truss, in a quite sparsely populated classroom (nobody wants to do further maths; it’s very hard!). Truss and I met a few times in the late 00s, when the conservatives, in opposition, were still pretending to be interested in broad, anodyne, bipartisan discussions. We definitely did a panel on feminism together, maybe also a fringe event at a Tory conference. She probably wouldn’t remember those, but if she did, she would be able to make a fair summation of my feelings towards her, and that would be awkward – or, as the young people say, super awks. I was really thinking of her daughter. They had probably had an identical conversation beforehand. “If anyone accuses you of quadrupling their mortgage, what are you going to say?” “I’m going to say, ‘What’s a mortgage?’”
That panel on feminism stuck in my mind because Truss was like a machine: staccato delivery, incredibly robust self-assurance. She was making a Thatcherite case for hyper-individualism – equality would be achieved by everyone, men and women alike, fighting for their own interests. Systems change was for wimps. I remember thinking that she was wrong but still winning, because I just couldn’t match her pugnacity – it looked exhausting. I put it down to the fact that I’d just had a baby, but in hindsight – I can do this amount of maths – she must have also just had a baby.
Back in 2009, I thought Truss was definitely an unusual person, tunnel-visioned and mirthless, but I did not think: “This politician is really going somewhere.” I could hear the inflection of the transatlantic thinktank, but no way did I think, “These are just the first green shoots of a free-market fundamentalism that will enliven ideological rightwing politics, impoverish our nation from multiple directions, and transform my life by quadrupling my mortgage.”
Fast-forward through 15 years of unimaginable political upheaval, and here I was camouflaging myself by joining an intense discussion between a prospective student in year 11 and a successful applicant in year 12, and yes, they were talking about maths. While I didn’t have any specific instructions about not gatecrashing an impenetrable conversation between two teenagers, you could have filed that under “behaviour so obviously wrong it shouldn’t need to be proscribed”. Luckily, H had still not returned and I didn’t find her for ages. When I finally did, she said archly, “How was Liz Truss?” and I said, “What’s a Liz Truss?”
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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