By Emily RetterSenior Feature Writer,
He quickly handed her the notes he was clutching tightly for her victory speech with a wide smile of congratulation and a comforting rub on her back. She took them without a glance and bounded straight for the stage.
Hugh O’Leary, 48, our new Prime Minister’s accountant husband, could currently walk down a street unnoticed. Probably even Downing Street.
About to enter Number 10 by his wife’s side, or maybe three steps behind, with their two teenage daughters – the first teens to slope self-consciously behind the black front door since the Blairs 25 years ago – this gentle-looking everyman has been largely absent from Truss’s campaign trail.
Much as Denis Thatcher once described himself unwittingly menacingly as the “most shadowy husband of all time”, O’Leary seems to be forging the same stealthy niche.
“Always present, never there” was Denis’s motto, Theresa May ’s husband Philip later followed suit, and it appears O’Leary will now take the same baton as a Tory spouse. A baton Carrie Johnson dropped with a clanger – or, more likely, never accepted.
Currently believed to work from home, and sniffily labeled a ‘house husband’, Truss rarely mentions O’Leary. Although she has praised him for always being on hand to answer an economic query (which may come in handy in the months ahead).
Former London School of Economics student O’Leary apparently knows to make himself useful. “Whenever I want a late night discussion about supply side reform or econometrics, there’s always someone on hand,” she once said. Oh, the romance.
The maths whizz, perhaps soon to be tackling the nation’s energy woes from his pillow, grew up in Allerton, Liverpool, before his family moved to Heswall, Wirral.
A fellow Tory, in 2002 he stood as candidate in the Greenwich council elections, but lost. Although he still canvasses with the blues, Truss is given full ownership of the stage.