What are the odds of Liz Truss becoming the next Tory leader?

Even making allowances for the usual vanity of politicians, it does rather look as though Liz Truss is stepping up her campaign for the party leadership. The latest media move is one of those high-profile, image-building pieces that basically amount to a declaration of malign intent. Truss is a natural for these, with her Theresa May-like taste for stylish gear and a willingness to pose any which way the features editors would like her to.

You may remember a fashion shoot, sorry policy interview, she did for The Mail on Sunday a couple of years ago, when she appeared bent double in a pair of giant baggy trousers, vaguely reminiscent of David Bowie in his Scary Monsters clowny phase. Maybe that’s appropriate for Truss’s increasingly metaphysical approach to politics.

Politically featureless, with no fixed abode – she’s been everything in her time, from a Social Democrat to Cameron Remainer to, most recently, anti-scientific hardline Brexiteer – she represents a blank canvas upon which the Tories can paint whatever they like, magical thinking included. That’s an excellent approach to winning the leadership, but a terrible manifesto for government. These days she does rather make Boris Johnson sound look like head of research at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She’s on manoeuvres, again, and travels light.

The Times is Truss’s latest vehicle, and an anonymous “former adviser” even goes so far as to suggest a possible slogan for her leadership campaign: “Believe in yourself, believe in Britain.” It’s ridiculous, suggesting that she’s a kind of latter-day Yuri Geller, and that if the country just concentrates really hard and imagines a world without scaremongering scientists, Covid will just go away.

It was, after all, she who demanded in the last cabinet meeting that the government wait for “incontrovertible evidence” about Omicron, ie the bodies piling high – by which time, of course, it will be too late to save lives. But it was the kind of thing that most of the 101 backbench rebels wanted to hear. Her new job as foreign secretary, now incorporating Lord Frost’s Brexit brief, also allows her to go around making empty threats to the EU, China and the Russians. She’s waving Article 16 around, which will do her no harm.

There are other unmistakable clues to Truss’s latest push for the leadership. There was that photograph of her in a tank, unmistakably echoing a very similar image of Margaret Thatcher in her full Iron Lady Cold War pomp. Then there was the carefully composed regal portrait for the official Foreign Office Christmas tweet, complete with antique globe and giant union jack, offering seasonal greetings to the world, which led some to dub her “Elizabeth III”.

Truss has recruited a “digital media special adviser” to look after Instagram and other important channels. It is paying off. She has her fan base among MPs, reportedly on a WhatsApp group run by Dehenna Davison – one of the 2019 intake – and her followers are fond of declaring “In Liz We Truss”. With the zeal of a convert, they have forgiven her her Remainer past. Meanwhile, Priti Patel has been sunk by the refugee crisis, Dominic Raab shamed by the retreat from Kabul, and Rishi Sunak has been compromised by tax hikes and vast public borrowing.

All that said, Liz isn’t quite the favourite. The last Conservative Home poll on who should be the next leader saw her picked by only 12 per cent, to Sunak’s 31 per cent, of those who took part. The bookies have Busy Lizzie some way behind in the odds, at 5-1, against 9-4 for Rishi. Against that, Truss has the highest ratings of any minister, while Johnson’s are deeply negative – and it’s the members who will decide the final choice of PM in a national poll, a first in UK politics.

The immediate problem for Truss is overdoing it – appearing desperate and disloyal to Johnson. Often, as the saying goes, the hand that wields the knife never wears the crown – a little like when Michael Heseltine deposed Mrs Thatcher in 1990, but John Major won the contest. It’s hers for the losing, in other words, and she isn’t the type to bottle it.