An article on the Politico website claims that a trip to the Vale Park stadium galvanized Liz Truss’s Tory leadership campaign.
Truss received the backing of the Tory party to become the party’s new leader and hence Prime Minister after she defeated rival Rishi Sunak in a leadership contest.
The Politico article explains how Truss’ team used the boardroom at the stadium to hone her debating skills for a key debate after she had received negative press coverage for her performances earlier in the campaign.
It claims:
It was in the unlikely surrounds of Port Vale Football Club, a perpetually lower-league team in central England, that the course of British political history was set.
In a rented boardroom overlooking the 15,000-capacity Vale Park pitch, Liz Truss was being put through her paces. Around the table were two of her most trusted aides, taking turns to roleplay the one man standing in her path to 10 Downing Street — Truss’ former Cabinet colleague, Rishi Sunak. Another colleague acted as a real-time fact checker. A live televised debate with Sunak on primetime BBC1 loomed in Stoke-on-Trent, and the stakes could not have been higher.
Truss, the U.K. foreign secretary, who had variously been branded “stiff as whisked egg white,” as sounding like a superannuated 1980s Amstrad computer, and written off as “everyone’s preferred comedy candidate” after a disastrous first TV outing on Channel 4 just 10 days before, was listening hard to her advisers. She knew something had to change — and fast.
Rob Butler, Truss’ parliamentary private secretary at the foreign office and a former Channel 5 News presenter, and Jason Stein, a long-trusted strategist who once advised Prince Andrew, were drafted into the Port Vale boardroom to coach Truss through that night’s BBC head-to-head. It was the Monday after her place on the final ballot had been secured, and days before the all-important Tory grassroots members would start voting on which of the final two candidates should be Britain’s next prime minister.
Those close to Truss say she felt far better prepared than she had for those early, rushed debates, allowing her to relax into the role.
That evening, she was a woman transformed — calm and steely in the face of a shouty and visibly overexcited Sunak, who knew he desperately needed a game-changer moment after polling of Tory members showed Truss was by far the preferred candidate. Every poll and every pundit called the debate for Truss. Her allies dared to believe that the momentum in the race to replace Boris Johnson was finally tilted in her favor.
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