Liz truss

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Truss says sorry, Hunt reverses mini-Budget and Kanye West buys Parler

Home Liz Truss said in a BBC interview as Prime Minister that she wanted to ‘say sorry for the mistakes that have been made’. Declaring that she would lead the Conservatives into the next election, she addressed blocs of MPs: the One Nation group one day, the European Research Group the next. She watched Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer whom she had just appointed to replace Kwasi Kwarteng, deliver a statement to the Commons reversing most of the provisions of the ‘fiscal event’ of 23 September. The new Chancellor announced the end of current subsidies for domestic energy bills in April, preferring something that ‘will cost the taxpayer

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Has a Conservative government got any power at all?

In the House of Commons on Monday, someone accused Liz Truss’s government of being ‘in office but not in power’. By chance, I was sitting in the peers’ gallery immediately behind the author of that famous phrase, Norman Lamont, who applied it to John Major’s administration in his resignation statement as chancellor in 1993. It grows ever more apt. I sometimes wonder if modern politicians positively welcome this situation. It is a general feature of the structures of the EU, where no elected politician has real power, but none seems to mind. Much of the joy of ‘compassionate’ Conservatives at the trouncing of Truss appears to derive from the proof

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Liz Truss survival plan

At the first stage of the Conservative leadership race, when Liz Truss was trying to win MPs’ support, her message was that she was the one who could ‘unite the right’. Now, her plan to survive in No. 10 relies on dividing the Tory left. Regicide is a messy business. ‘It’s very hard to push her out,’ says a former cabinet minister. ‘We would need to change the rules. It could be seen as an establishment stitch-up. I think she needs to do the right thing and resign.’ Everyone in the Tory party agrees that there needs to be a unity candidate when Truss goes, but there is absolutely no

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

What will the Halloween Budget bring?

Liz Truss did not think that spending cuts would be a major part of her agenda. She and her first chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, were confident that markets, having lent Britain billions of pounds to cover the cost of the lockdowns, would be more than happy to do the same to transform the economy. Their argument was, as it turned out, calamitously wrong. The miscalculation cost Kwarteng his job and the Prime Minister her power. Truss’s new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has dismantled almost all of her plans. ‘Trussonomics’ has been snuffed out. This temporarily calmed the markets. But abandoning tax cuts – as painful as it was – will soon prove

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Whips stay in post after a night of chaos

In a sign of how chaotic tonight has been for the Conservative party, I have now been told that the Chief Whip Wendy Morton and her deputy Craig Whittaker have not left the government after all. I have spoken to Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, who says: ‘I have just seen the deputy and he is categorical that neither he nor the chief have resigned.’ No. 10 has belatedly confirmed this too. Steve Baker seems to be the only minister trying to offer some kind of government line What seems to have happened is this. The whips instructed the party that the fracking vote would be a confidence issue this morning.

Steerpike Steerpike

Revealed: the reason top Truss aide was suspended

Embattled, humiliated and lampooned, Liz Truss has few public allies left. And she certainly has one less after today, following the suspension of Jason Stein, her acting director of communications in No. 10. Stein is a longtime supporter who managed much of Truss’s press operations during the summer leadership campaign. But shortly before PMQs the BBC reported that Stein had been suspended and is now due to face a formal investigation by the Propriety and Ethics Team in Whitehall. It follows a briefing in last week’s Sunday Times in which unnamed No. 10 sources had ridiculed the prospect of Sajid Javid replacing Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor. A source close to

Steerpike Steerpike

Liz Truss’s media strategy revealed

It’s the age-old dilemma for a media advisor when your politician is in a jam. How do you get out of doing an interview you really don’t want to do? Liz Truss’s former spad Kirsty Buchanan gave us an answer to that question to this morning when she revealed to the Whitehall Sources podcast just how her minister used to evade appearances on Question Time back when she was running the Ministry of Justice: Liz Truss when I worked for her, she obviously didn’t like the media so we used to spend quite a lot of time making up excuses and killing off minor members of her family so that

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Liz Truss apologises for the chaos. What next?

Finally, we hear from the Prime Minister. Liz Truss has given an interview to the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason. It comes at the end of a day in which she was accused of ‘hiding under a desk’ and emerged in the Commons only for a silent half an hour of blinking occasionally. She apologised, saying: ‘Firstly I want to accept responsibility and say sorry, for the mistakes that have been made.’ Truss did not appear comfortable this evening. It would have been weird if she did The Prime Minister has left others to argue that the government is still functioning. What she hasn’t done, until now, is offer any

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The effective PM has some difficult choices to make

Jeremy Hunt’s statement to the Commons underlined that he is now running the government. This wasn’t just evident from what he said, but from what was happening as he said it. The Chancellor spoke with the Prime Minister sitting behind him in silence, barely moving save to blink. Liz Truss had belatedly entered the chamber at the end of the Urgent Question that she had refused to answer herself, and then left half an hour later. But the statement also showed us quite how hard it is going to be for any caretaker leader, de facto prime minister or other figure to take the party back into a place where

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Has Hunt restored the government’s fiscal credibility?

Jeremy Hunt set out at the start of the weekend with one goal in mind: that when the gilt markets reopened on Monday, the cost of government borrowing would not surge further. Ideally, it would start to fall. In this sense, it’s been a successful day for the new Chancellor. The Treasury’s early morning update that a major fiscal announcement was about to be announced saw gilt yields start to drop when markets opened at 8 a.m. After Hunt’s overhaul of the mini-Budget – including the surprising decision to suspend the 1p cut to the basic rate of tax ‘indefinitely’ – they fell even further. After starting the day at

Steerpike Steerpike

Flashback: Truss promises ‘no new taxes’

Trussonomics is dead, long live Treasury orthodoxy. New Chancellor Jeremy Hunt unpicked the bulk of his next-door neighbour’s policy agenda on TV this morning, telling the nation that nearly all of the tax measures that have not started legislation would now be reversed. Income tax will now remain at 20 per cent ‘indefinitely’, the free on alcohol rates has been scrapped with only the National Insurance and Stamp Duty breaks surviving. Hunt also confirmed that he will go ahead with Rishi Sunak’s planned corporation tax increase next April from 19 per cent to 25 per cent.  It’s a dramatic break with Liz Truss’s promise in, er, August at the Tory husting

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Can you feel sorry for Liz Truss?

It is not easy to feel sorry for Liz Truss. She has a deeply unattractive streak of vanity – when in the Foreign Office, she seemed more interested in posing for the official photographers who trailed her round than she did in building relationships with the places she visited. She campaigned hard and sometimes dirty to obtain a job for which she was manifestly out of her depth. Once in that job, she exercised power with peremptory arrogance. She rewarded people who had sucked up to her, cast out anyone who had spoken up for her rival, and allowed experienced civil servants to be hoofed ruthlessly out of their jobs.

Sunday

Katy Balls

How long can Liz Truss hold on?

How much trouble is Liz Truss in? Just six weeks into her premiership, the Prime Minister’s economic plans are in tatters after she axed her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, reversed on her campaign pledge to scrap the scheduled corporation tax hike and brought in Jeremy Hunt as his successor. Now Hunt is calling the shots on the economy and he plans to reverse much of what the Truss government have announced so far, with tax rises and public spending cuts to come. Truss’s own supporters are privately asking what the point of her government is now. Unsurprisingly, this has all led to talk among Tory MPs that the end is nigh.

Lionel Barber

Jeremy Hunt is the ‘unity’ leader the Tories need

Liz Truss is now prime minister in name only: Jeremy Hunt, her chancellor of the exchequer, now holds power. He has repudiated her tax-cutting mini-Budget in a round of media appearances – his performances being far more convincing than Truss’s graceless eight-minute press conference on Friday. His admission that spending cuts will be needed and that ‘some taxes are going to go up’ to balance the books has injected a much-needed dose of realism. The question on everyone’s lips is: what will Hunt do now? Is he a stalking horse for a new PM (Rishi Sunak being the obvious candidate) or is the former head boy at Charterhouse himself a

Steerpike Steerpike

Watch: first Tory MP calls for Truss to go

In office, Liz Truss promised to be the ‘disruptor in chief’. Unfortunately, most of that disruption has proved to be in the markets and the polls as her short-lived revolution tanked the standing of both her currency and her party. With Labour and mortgage rates on the rise, Truss’s authority has disappeared within days. She’s been forced to ditch her ideological soulmate Kwasi Kwarteng for Jeremy Hunt, the embodiment of Tory orthodoxy, and is now very much a prisoner of her party as they try to find someone – anyone – who can dig them out of their self-inflicted mess. Most of these discussions are happening behind closed doors as

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Is Truss a ‘libertarian jihadist’?

Jeremy Hunt – ‘The Prime Minister is in charge’ To say things do not look rosy for Liz Truss would be quite the understatement. With the government now on its second Chancellor in as many months, and its once flagship policies being hastily swept under the carpet, the Conservative party appears to be in damage limitation mode. Laura Kuenssberg spoke to the new Chancellor this morning, in a pre-recorded interview, asking him if Truss was now such a damaged figure that he was the one really calling the shots: ‘There is a very difficult job to be done right now’ Hunt told Kuenssberg that he would be looking at all

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hunt on Truss: ‘She’s willing to change’

Liz Truss’s gaoler has just done another BBC interview. Jeremy Hunt continued to try and give himself maximum room for manoeuvre, saying ‘I’m not taking anything off the table’. He repeated his message: We are going to have to take some very difficult decisions both on spending and on tax. Spending is not going to increase by as much as people hoped, and indeed we’re going to have to ask all government departments to find more efficiencies than they’d planned. And taxes are not going to go down as quickly as people thought, and some taxes are going to go up. It will be fascinating to see if Truss is

Steerpike Steerpike

Does Joe Biden know what ‘super-wealthy’ Americans pay in tax?

Joe Biden, ice cream in hand as so often, yesterday pronounced on Liz Truss’s tax reform disaster.  ‘I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,’ said Joe Biden, sounding every bit the wise old man of global politics. ‘I think that the idea of cutting taxes on the super-wealthy at a time when… I disagree with the policy, but that’s up to Great Britain.’ That concession at the end is the President realising he’s just breached the normal rules of diplomacy – by giving his opinion on an ally’s domestic difficulties. But he just can’t help himself. Biden has probably forgotten, but he has proposed increasing the

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Who voted for Jeremy Hunt to run Britain?

Jeremy Hunt has no mandate to lead Britain. He couldn’t muster sufficient Tory MPs behind him to properly enter the last leadership contest. He was beaten overwhelmingly in the one before that.  He was a key part of the failed Theresa May administration that lost a parliamentary majority at a general election. He played no role in the Boris Johnson administration that won it back with plenty to spare (a victory from which the Conservative mandate to govern still flows). Yet in a round of interviews this weekend, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer simply ripped up the economic agenda of Liz Truss. He mocked and then buried the PM’s

Saturday

Steerpike

Ben Wallace: If defence spending pledge goes, so do I

In politics, where there’s death, there’s life. And as Liz Truss’s premiership crumbles before our eyes, all attention in SW1 is which lucky legislator gets to replace her. Second time Sunak? The people’s Penny? Back again Boris? Or perhaps the man who many wanted to run this summer but ended up dropping out: Ben Wallace, the popular Defence Secretary.  The former Scots Guards officer has been a long-standing fixture at the top of the ConservativeHome Cabinet rankings but opted to back Liz Truss in July rather than run himself. Instead, he extracted a pledge from the Trussette to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030 – a