LIZ TRUSS insisted on splashing £3,000 on a luxury lunch at a private club owned by a Tory donor despite being advised not to, it was revealed today. 

The Foreign Secretary, who is said to be vying for PM, “refused to consider anywhere else” and requested taxpayers’ cash for the event with US President Joe Biden’s trade representative, according to leaked correspondence. 

Her civil servants were so alarmed at the proposals that the request was referred to the top official at the Department for International Trade (DiT). 

According to the correspondence, disclosed by the Sunday Times, Mr Truss, the then trade secretary, “explicitly asked that we book 5 Hertford Street.”

The private members’ club is owned by Robin Birley, a £20,000 donor to PM Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign, a Ukip donor and the half-brother of Environment Minister Zac Goldsmith.

Emails by a civil servant described the club as “obviously incredibly expensive and more than I understand we’d usually expect to pay for such a venue.”

After negotiations with civil servants, the venue agreed to reduce the bill to £1,400, but on the condition of immediate payment – which meant Ms Truss’s staff had to use an emergency process to pay up straight away.

She also dismissed suggestions to move the lunch to an alternative, less pricey, venue. 

The politicians were reported to have dined on bottles of wine costing up to £153 a pop at the lunch, hosted in June last year. 

Shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry suggested that Mr Truss has a track record of using public money to “foot the bill for her expensive taste.”

Ms Thornberry highlighted a previous example when the former trade secretary took three staff members on a four-day trip to Vietnam and Singapore in December 2020. 

Ms Truss was forced to correct an answer to a Parliamentary question about the costs of the trip, which initially omitted that the group had spent more than £4,000 on expenses alone. 

In total the trip cost the taxpayer £20,296 on flights, £3,980 on accommodation and £4,034 — or £250 a day for each person — on expenses.

Ms Thornberry said: “This is about character and if Truss’s natural instinct is to hide the truth and hope no-one asks questions when it comes to small things, don’t be surprised when she does it about big things.”

A DIT spokesperson said: “This was a diplomatic working dinner attended by the previous international trade secretary, senior UK officials and US counterparts from our largest single trading partner.”