Conservative MPs have chosen their final two candidates to be the next prime minister and Norfolk has skin in the game. Here Richard Porritt weighs up Liz Truss' chances.

Liz Truss has come a long way since attending a comprehensive school in Leeds.

She claims the children there back in the 1980s were "let down". But she struggled through, clawed her way to Oxford and then a plum job at Shell.

But it was not just her early life that was a scrap - her rise to the top (almost) in politics has been anything but smooth.

Right from the start she was mired in controversy. After she was adopted as South West Norfolk's Tory candidate it emerged she had embarked on an affair with another Tory MP. Some people in the local constituency - dubbed the Turnip Taliban - tried to get her candidacy revoked.

But, like most of her political foes, they were defeated.

Ms Truss is gregarious and friendly in private but determined to be steely and tough in public. Unfortunately this doesn't always work.

She has a skill for the awkward and the odd - who can forget her infamous 2014 conference speech? It. Was. A. Disgrace.

I was in that audience. As the confused yet amused delegates shuffled out few of them would have believed the environment minister who had spent so long banging on about pork markets and cheese imports would one day be a hair's breadth from the threshold of Number 10.

But that is Ms Truss' biggest skill. She is robust, thick-skinned and above all else she is relentless.

And, up against Rishi Sunak, I believe she is now the favourite to win and be crowned PM on September 5.

Although MPs preferred the former chancellor the members will adore Ms Truss' economic position.

As an economic libertarian her views will chime with the membership's continued adoration of Margaret Thatcher.

She wants to cut taxes and "govern like a Conservative". That will be music to the ears of the true blue Tories in the shires and beyond.

She might be clumsy at times. She might not ooze the confidence of her hero Mrs Thatcher. But she might now be unstoppable.