New Foreign Secretary Liz Truss once protested against the Tory government, chanting the slogan: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie - oot, oot, oot.”
Truss said her childhood demonstration against the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was done in a Scottish accent as she lived in Paisley at the time.
The big winner in Boris Johnson’s cabinet reshuffle, explained her radical, left-wing roots in an interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson.
She told the veteran interviewer how she spent part of her childhood in Scotland where her Labour-supporting parents were involved in anti-nuclear marches in the 1980s dominated by one particular political chant.
She said: “So we lived in Scotland, in Paisley near Glasgow. My dad was a lecturer at the local university.
"I remember standing in the Paisley piazza and we were chanting that slogan and other slogans. It was in Scottish so it was ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, oot, oot, oot.’”
Truss’s family moved to Scotland when she was four years old but they moved again and she went to a comprehensive school in Leeds before finishing her schooling in Canada and going to Oxford University.
Speaking of her early political memories, she said her mother, a nurse and a teacher, used to visit the Faslane peace camp and protest against nuclear weapons.
She said: “My mother took me on CND marches in the 80s. We used to go to local peace camp. I remember one occasion where we had a nuclear bomb that we made out of some old carpet rolls that we took along to a demonstration.”
Truss was President of Oxford University Liberal Democrats but joined the Conservative Party in 1996 and became MP for South West Norfolk in 2010.
She is not the only cabinet member with a radical past or a Scottish connection.
Michael Gove, the new Housing and Communities Minister, served on the picket line as a journalist in a trade union dispute with the Press and Journal newspaper in the 1980s.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace was an officer in the Scots Guards and served as list MSP for the North East of Scotland in the first Scottish parliament before moving to become and MP for Lancaster and Wyre in 2005.
