Lettuce Liz v Turnip Taliban: Inside Truss’s battle to save her Norfolk seat

Nearly two years ago Liz Truss was riding high as Prime Minister, darling of the Conservative right and representing one of the safest seats in the country. She’d seen off an earlier attempt by local Tory activists – dubbed the Turnip Taliban – to unseat her.

That was then. Now they’re back for the sequel: Lettuce v Turnip 2:  Revenge of the Root Vegetables. This box office bout being played out in South West Norfolk is pitting erstwhile Tories against Truss again. Its third act is not yet written but could see Labour handed the victory laurels.

In Norfolk the whoomphs of fighter jets overhead compete with the cooing of wood pigeons. Farmers are watering their sugar beet in the scorching June sun. Children drip ice lollies down their summer uniforms. But away from the fields and hedgerows, battle is being fought. Eight candidates are vying to get rid of Truss.

“This is a referendum about her performance both locally, nationally and for her own party,” independent candidate James Bagge told i. “For anyone who votes Conservative; they should be very unhappy about the way she reflects back on the Conservative Party.”

If the polls are correct nationwide, voters are ready to end 14 years of Tory rule. Some blame Truss in particular for higher bills after her disastrous mini-budget roiled markets and led to a surge in borrowing costs. Truss, 48, has since blamed her downfall on a shadowy establishment or “dinner party elite” of journalists, the Labour Party, and the economic orthodoxy of bankers and officials.

Bagge is a founding member of the Turnip Taliban, the nickname for Truss’ critics in this rural slice of East Anglia.  A “traditional Conservative,” he feels let down by Truss’s “abuse” of the constituency and performance as local MP and Prime Minister.  “It’s not a grudge,” he insists in an interview in Downham Market, near its iconic black and white tower clock.

Eight candidates are vying to get rid of Liz Truss, in her formerly safe seat of South West Norfolk

Around the constituency, Bagge’s boards and banners outnumber Truss’s presence by about 30-1. Two of Truss’s signs had to be withdrawn after being graffitied. According to locals, one was altered to “Trump,” and another was daubed with the simple but damning: “No.”

You couldn’t find a more typical Tory than Bagge, 71. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he served as a British army officer. A career followed as a criminal barrister and partner at a London law firm, and stints as high sheriff and deputy lieutenant in Norfolk. His great-great-grandfather was a Conservative MP.

With his upper-class vowels, Bagge come across as patrician with a sense of noblesse oblige handed down through generations of landowners. He’s also trying to lasso support from the swathes of ex-Londoners who’ve retired to bungalows only an hour and a half from Kings Cross.

Ahead of an election rally, Bagge flirts gently with an elderly lady on a mobility scooter – “I won’t tell my other half we were together” – and chats to 14-year-old schoolgirl, Yvie. At Downham Market Academy, the pupils are running mock elections. “No one wants to play Liz Truss,” Yvie confides.

Former Tory Cabinet minister Dominic Grieve has come to lend Bagge his support. Both men are wearing navy on sky rosettes, a symbol of the blue-on-blue Tory infighting they reluctantly represent.  Grieve, who was chucked out of the Tories in 2019 by Boris Johnson for his Brexit defiance, says Bagge would be a good choice.

“I don’t think this is a patrician endeavour at all,” Grieve told i, pointing to Bagge’s charitable work and local connections. “It doesn’t come across that way and lot of people helping him are not in that category at all. I think these communities are much more about what people do than how people sound.”

While Norfolk’s voters were prepared to make allowances for Truss during her terms as foreign secretary and then prime minister, they expected her attention to return to their local concerns when she was pushed to the back benches. Instead, many say, she’s hardly been around.

“She’s a bit like the Scarlet Pimpernel; we hear reports of her being around but she’s not there,” John Jaworski, 78, a retired television producer told i at The Crown pub. “Asking how Liz Truss is viewed in this part of the world is a non-question because, as far as we’re concerned, she is never viewed.”

Ex-Tory Cabinet minister Dominic Grieve is backing a campaign by the ‘Turnip Taliban’ to unseat his former colleague. Grieve pictured with independent candidate James Bagge

Hunting for Truss requires the patience of a producer for a David Attenborough nature documentary. In Norfolk she’s as rare a sighting as a Caspian Tern or a Lesser Yellow Legs. Asked if they’d spotted their local MP, most voters agreed she had been out and about but could only report this second-hand. Running a jack-in-a-box campaign strategy with carefully staged brief meetings, it was hard to find anyone who had actually met her in person.

According to Lib Dem candidate Josie Ratcliffe, the key tell for the Lesser Spotted Truss is the security detail.  Burly men in black suits, sunglasses and 4×4 vehicles park incongruously outside a quaint teashop before Truss leaps out to shake hands and vanish again. Radcliffe, 55, an ex-HGV driver and the Liberal Democrat candidate argues this approach is disenfranchising voters.

“I keep hearing of sightings but after it’s after she’s gone so ordinary people can’t go and see her,” Ratcliffe told i. “For someone who’s been our MP for 14 years, and wants to be our MP again, to be completely unreachable at this time is a poor look.”

The security guards are a perk afforded to every former prime minster. Even though she served for 49 days, Truss us allowed to claim £115,000 a year to help pay for her office and extra security.  Fearing a rebuff from voters, locals say Truss’s aides have been known to check whether they will shake hands before ushering her over to meet them.

Eventually – with some effort – a voter is found who has met Truss. Nicky George, the landlord of The Greyhound pub in Swaffham, says Truss came in to watch a football match on the night the eight other candidates were holding election hustings.

George, 55, has erected scaffolding in the pub garden to cram in punters for the euros. He says it’s the Tories who are the problem, not Truss herself. “She’s a nice-enough lady but it’s just the party at the moment; people just want change,” he told i. “She has a big majority, but the result will be tight.” Truss declined to speak to the i for this piece. Her spokesman said that she is not conducting any interviews with the national press during the campaign.

Speaking privately, an ally said Truss had been out campaigning every day during the campaign, visiting towns and villages and had been approachable to anybody who wanted a chat. On the night of the hustings, they insisted, Truss had a prior engagement.

Liberal Democrat candidate Josie Ratcliffe accused Truss of being “unreachable” on local issues

At the hospital which serves Norfolk, the roof is being held up by thousands of stilts in a building that outlived its 30-year lifespan a decade ago. Voters won’t see a new building until 2030. Norfolk is consistently ranked one of the worst places in the country for access to dentists.

The Trusted Broomstick shop in Swaffham sells candles, dream catchers, crystals, tie dye clothes and other essentials for the modern witch. Laura Smith, 53, stands behind the counter.  Asked what she thinks about Truss, she replies: “I don’t. The country has gone totally tits-up.”

On paper Truss’s constituency of South West Norfolk should be solid Tory territory, with a majority of 26,195 in 2019. There is a question mark over how much of Truss’s support will switch to Bagge or the Reform UK candidate, former teacher Toby McKenzie. Fed-up voters may just stay home.

Nursing a blackcurrant at The Greyhound pub is Leigh Bond, 30. She’s not paid much attention to the election but catches glimpses of the debate on the front pages of the newspapers in the Morrisons where she works. She sometimes gets her news from Facebook where the politicians “are all slagging each other off.”

Labour candidate Terry Jermy told i that Truss has neglected the constituency to try and promote herself abroad

She’s not sure how she’ll choose next week from the long list of candidates in South West Norfolk. “My opinion won’t change anything,” Bond shrugs. “Maybe they should all find a way to work together.”

A poll published Wednesday predicted nationwide Tory apocalypse. The Find Out Now and Electoral Calculus survey suggested Rishi Sunak and a swathe of senior ministers could lose their seats including Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, and Oliver Dowden, the Deputy Prime Minister. If true, Truss could also be ousted.

This time round Labour would need a swing of 26% to win the seat. Blue since 1964, the area could go red if Keir Starmer sweeps to power on a parliamentary landslide. That puts Labour candidate Terry Jermy, 38, within touching distance of becoming an MP next week. Jermy runs a local magazine and sits on town, district and county councils alongside his charity work. He is allowing himself the luxury of imaging he could beat Truss.

“I do genuinely believe it’s me or her,” he told i at his office in Thetford. “Liz Truss’s vote will go down significantly. It’s a question of whether it will go down enough for somebody else to take over.”

South West Norfolk voter Leigh Bond told i she was tired of politicians

Jermy says Truss is making up for lost time by working hard during the six-week campaign, having vanished overseas earlier in the year to make hundreds of thousands of pounds in paid speeches and to promote her polemical score-settling memoir, Ten Years to Save the West.

“I think she forgot she needs to keep up that constituency MP role,” Jermy said. “Time and again people are telling me they don’t see her. The various foreign trips come up repeatedly on the doorstep. We are a very low-wage economy in South West Norfolk. When people hear about their MP being paid a lot of money on top of their MP’s salary, that annoys them.”

With 42 aunts and uncles and 100 cousins, Jermy has a ready-made troop of helpers living nearby. Christmas, he says, is “chaotic and expensive.”

Yet come election time, that built-in support network – a Jermy Army – comes in handy. “I’ve never counted but I’ve got around 50 cousins living in Thetford,” he said. “My brother puts my boards up for me; he’s good at DIY. My mum stuck 700 stamps on envelopes the other day. Luckily, they were self-adhesive.”

Signs promoting Truss are hard to find in her South West Norfolk constituency.

Unlike signs promoting ‘Turnip Taliban’ rival James Bagge

Popular GP and local councillor Pallavi Devulapalli is standing for the Green Party, a persuasive advocate for more NHS dentists. Also on the ballot paper are Gary Conway representing the Heritage Party, Lorraine Douglas from the Communist Party of Great Britain and Earl Elvis of East Anglia for the Monster Raving Loony Party.

“In South West Norfolk nearly a third of people are prepared to vote tactically to change the government,” Naomi Smith CEO of Best for Britain and founder of tactical vote site getvoting.org told i. “In this seat that means backing Labour. One in five already voting for Starmer’s party say they’re doing so as a tactical choice”.

For election afficionados, South West Norfolk is expected to declare its result around 5 am on Friday morning. Could Truss become a modern Michael Portillo, whose loss provided a shocking and memorable symbol of the 1997 election?

“It wouldn’t just be a Portillo moment, it would be even less expected than Joey Essex entering the Love Island villa,” Smith said.