The former lover of the UK’s shortest term Prime Minister, Liz Truss, has spoken out over their controversial love affair back in the early 2000s. It was one he said, ruined his marriage.
Mark Field, now 60, served as the MP for Cities of London and Westminster from 2001 – 2019 – and now in 2025 he has said via the Daily Mail that the “first serious signs of cracks” in his marriage began ‘just as Elizabeth Truss entered his life’.
Mark had been married to Michele, a director with two stockbroking firms, since 1994. He said that the pair never seemed to regard children in their future and barely had any arguments.
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Something he said he perhaps saw as “reassuring” when “perhaps alarm bells ought to have been ringing”. It was shortly after these cracks began to show that he met the doomed future Prime Minister.
Mark said that he met Liz at the Conservative Party Conference in October 2002 in the “romantic dimmed lights” of Highcliff Hotel in Bournemouth. He said that Liz, now 49, who at the time (and still is) was married to Hugh O’Leary, and had been since 2000, slid over to join him and his friend in conversation.
At the time Liz was not an MP but would go on to become one in 2010 for South West Norfolk until May 2024. Mark said that as the pair left each other for the evening, he ‘wished her all the best’, and said “Please get in touch if I can be of any help”.
The following Monday, he found an email waiting for him in his inbox. He said that Liz wanted advice about selection interview techniques so the pair met that same week.
Over that next year, he said, they got together for lunch or coffee on “an increasingly regular basis”. He said that: “Even then, Liz came across as an impulsive bundle of energy, obsessed by the workings and machinations of politics.”
When Mark joined the front bench of the shadow cabinet, he was asked to prepare the first draft of the party’s international trade policy. He said that Liz and he “worked enthusiastically together on this over several weeks”.
It was to his amusement that when she became Trade Secretary, she would still use the phrase ‘free and fair trade’ that they had coined together so many years before. The pair would go on to trade book recommendations and before long, Mark said, “barely a day would pass” without them at least speaking over the phone.
Mark said: “She was, I found, always exhilarating to be around. She could turn on a sixpence from being a wide-eyed wannabe, hanging on my every word, to an opinionated, stubborn and somewhat belligerent know-it-all.
“Her manic energy was intoxicating, disconcerting and exhausting. Not to mention at times utterly infuriating. A friend who knew us both well remarked on the evident chemistry between us at this time – how we’d both become so much more animated when talking of each other.”
It was then at the end of 2003, that the pairs friendship turned into something more.
Mark added: “But it was only at the end of 2003 that the intensity of my friendship with Liz turned into something else. Inevitably, there is something very unreal in any affair, especially when both parties are married and living with their spouses – Liz had married Hugh O’Leary, an accountant, just three years before.
“The mundanities of clearing the dinner table, putting out the rubbish or even settling down together to watch television play no part in your shared existence; instead, there is the anticipation and elation of a few precious hours spent in each other’s exclusive company and the thrill that comes with never quite being sure if this is the last time.
“Nevertheless, in my heart, I was painfully aware that our marriages were in very different places. Indeed, every three or four months, beset by what I took to be a mixture of guilt and indecision, Liz would try to cool things down.”
Mark said that he “quickly worked out” that the best response to this was to step back and make no attempt to contact her, which he said would leave her coming back after a week or so apologetically and they would “very soon be carrying on as before”.
In early 2005 it would seem that their affair would not be for much longer. Mark detailed her three-month general election campaign in the marginal Yorkshire constituency of Calder Valley, which she would go on to lose by under 1,400 votes.
He said that in that time he travelled up there a couple of times to watch her in action. Following the loss however, she returned to London and the pair carried on as before.
Despite he said, “an intense couple o months” where the pair “saw a lot of each other”, Parliament would go into recess and they headed away on family holidays, and his case, two overseas delegations. This blow would mean that they could not see each other for almost two months.
He said: “I am not sure I have ever really subscribed to the theory that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I remember feeling unsettled that summer. Clarity came in September when Liz told me that she was staying with her husband.
“I knew in an instant that my own marriage was over. Liz’s marriage, however, had, and still has, endured.”
Regarding her ill-fated leadership of the Conservative Party, Mark said: “She has many of the qualities that are essential to reaching the highest rank in politics – limitless ambition and self-belief, raw intelligence, resilience and an overwhelming sense of personal destiny.
“All her years of hard graft as a party activist, association chairwoman, three-time council and parliamentary candidate now stood her in the best possible stead. She alone understood what made the ageing party membership tick, so it came as no surprise to me when she wiped the floor with Rishi Sunak.
“In reality, her entire decade-long ministerial career had been an object lesson in relentlessly talking a good game – about individual freedom, smaller government, tax-cutting, economic growth and promoting market solutions – but actually delivering next to nothing.
“Yet for a decade she held a succession of Cabinet roles in which she was tipped for the sack at virtually every reshuffle. Having made it to 10 Downing Street against the odds, she was determined to do it her way. In her mind, she had been pragmatic for long enough, and now no one was going to stop her.
“Unfortunately, there was startlingly little to suggest that Liz had either the powers of inspirational leadership or the capacity to focus on the implementation of her policies.”
He continued: “Her grand plan to cut taxes and slash public expenditure flew in the face of the fact that the UK’s population is fast getting older and more dependent on the state. Meanwhile, her mantra of ‘growth, growth, growth’ was never backed up by the remotest evidence of how she would implement it.”
