By 5am on 5 July, it was clear to the hundreds of candidates, officials, activists and journalists gathered in the Lynnsport leisure centre in King’s Lynn for election night that the former prime minister Liz Truss had lost her parliamentary seat.
But from then until 6.45am, Truss was nowhere to be seen. Even when the other candidates were told to make their way on stage for the official announcement that Labour’s Terry Jermy had spectacularly overturned Truss’s previous majority of 26,000 to win the seat of South West Norfolk, the former prime minister was still not there.
When she did eventually walk in, the slow hand-clap that greeted her arrival and her refusal to make a concession speech from the stage provided the defining television moment of this year’s election. It was a high-profile and unexpected Tory defeat that underlined how far the Conservative party had fallen, just as Michael Portillo’s loss was in 1997.
So where was Truss? She says she had been having an early breakfast at McDonald’s with her daughters before getting delayed on her way to the count by a freight train at a level crossing. Others believe she was deciding whether or not to attend at all.
Looking back at that moment five months later, Jermy recalls it as a surreal end to a surreal night. “It was very bizarre,” he says. “I kept thinking: ‘Is this happening?’”
Jermy had never expected to be an MP. He was a councillor but had never run for national office before. And like most people in the Labour party, he regarded South West Norfolk, which has been blue since 1964, as almost unwinnable.
Yet during the campaign, both Labour and the Tories realised a fundamental shift was happening. “A week after we started campaigning, I remember saying to members of the team: ‘She could very well lose this,’” he recalls. “We were knocking on the doors of diehard Conservatives and they were saying: ‘We will not vote for Truss.’”
In her book Ten Years to Save the West, published in April, Truss claimed the backlash against her was less about her and more about her successor, Rishi Sunak. Sunak, she later wrote, “had been complicit in amplifying Labour’s lies and spreading smears about me and my premiership … My running under his banner in the general election had sent out a mixed message to electors.”
In the end, Truss remained on stage long enough to hear the result read out and her successor make a victory speech, before bustling out of the room, stopping only to give a brief interview to the BBC. When asked if she would like to apologise to those who felt let down by her, she ignored the question and hurried out.
“I thought she would give a speech,” says Jermy. “I had seen other Tories during the night giving generous concession speeches and I thought she might get up and thank her staff and her volunteers at least, but there was none of that.” Truss allies insist that at King’s Lynn the tradition is that only the victor speaks and that she was never given the opportunity to give her own message.
Since leaving national politics, Truss has continued to attract attention, making appearances at the Republican national convention and the Conservative party conference (where she claimed she would have done better in the election than Sunak, despite losing her own seat). Her message – that western politics is fundamentally broken and can only be fixed by bypassing the institutions she thought held her back in office – is finding an audience: her speech at conference packed out the auditorium.
Truss’s allies say she plans to continue making interventions at home and in the US, where she is a loud supporter of the incoming president, Donald Trump. Some believe she will attempt to retake her old seat at the next election, not least because she has issued press releases criticising her successor. Tory grandees would rather she stay well away from domestic politics.
As for Jermy, his new life is a little less globetrotting. “There are bits of the job I have really enjoyed,” he says. “Casework, constituency visits and surgeries – I have really enjoyed all of that. I am very much a presence in the constituency, and that is a bit of an adjustment for local people.”
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