Liz Truss has started appointing advisers to her inner circle, with political consultant Mark Fullbrook becoming chief of staff and Ruth Porter getting the deputy chief role. Truss has given the top job to Fullbrook, a political consultant who has worked for decades with Lynton Crosby, the electoral strategist, after he co-ran her campaign. Porter is a former adviser to Truss from her time as justice secretary, who subsequently worked for the London Stock Exchange and FGS Global, the communications firm. Others entering No 10 include Sophie Jarvis, a policy adviser who formerly worked for the Adam Smith Institute, a rightwing thinktank. Matt Sinclair, who formerly worked for the TaxPayers’ Alliance campaigning for lower taxes, will become her economics chief.
Truss’s head of strategy will be Iain Carter, a partner at Hanbury Strategy, and a former political director at Conservative party headquarters. The new prime minister is also bringing advisers from the Foreign Office with her into No 10, including her economic adviser Shabbir Merali and a policy adviser, Jamie Hope. She is splitting the role of communications director between Adam Jones, who will take on a political role, and Simon McGee, who will be a civil service official. Jones previously worked for Truss at the Foreign Office, while McGee is a former journalist and ex-civil service communications chief who once worked for Boris Johnson. Fullbrook, who was Truss’s co-campaign director, is entering government after a long-term partnership with Crosby as a political consultant. He struck out on his own this year with a new company, Fullbrook Strategies, which has lobbied the UK government on behalf of Libya’s controversial parliament and a company that won the biggest PPE deal of the pandemic through the VIP fast-track lane. The company has stopped its commercial activities in the last few days. But prior to that, it acted for Libya’s House of Representatives, which has twice attempted to overthrow the UN-established government of national unity in Tripoli, and Santé Global, formerly Unispace Health, which was awarded a £680m PPE contract in 2020.