The UK is heading for its third prime minister in eight weeks. In the 45 days that Liz Truss has been in power, the country has been rocked by the death of Queen Elizabeth II and suffered an economic crisis exacerbated by the PM’s first moves, with a series of senior ministers appointed then sacked. If you have been watching UK politics only distantly, here is a catch-up on what has been happening.
Truss became prime minister on 6 September after a summer campaigning to win the leadership of her Conservative party on a low-tax, high-growth policy platform. Within a couple of days of Truss taking office, the Queen died and politics paused for nearly two weeks of official mourning.
When it resumed, Truss’s then chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced a package of tax changes including abolishing the highest rate of income tax for the rich. Unusually for the UK, it did not come with a corresponding analysis from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. That, along with the tax cuts being funded by a huge rise in borrowing, spooked the markets. The pound crashed, the UK’s cost of borrowing rose, and mortgage interest rates rose amid already soaring inflation. The Bank of England had to spend billions to stabilise the pensions market.
After days of Truss insisting her budget was the right course, she made a U-turn on business taxes, and Kwarteng flew back early from an International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington to find himself sacked on arrival. Truss called a press conference to explain her decisions and … didn’t. The televised appearance lasted barely eight minutes, and she took only four questions before abruptly departing. She essentially said: I still agree with my policies, but I’ve sacked my finance minister because he announced them, and the market didn’t like them.
Truss then appointed Jeremy Hunt, who had previously endured heavy criticism for a stint as health secretary (with oversight of the NHS), as the new finance minister. On Monday he announced that almost every single aspect of Truss’s financial programme was to be ripped up, while she sat mutely in parliament beside him, leading people to call him the “de facto prime minister”, and say that she was “in office, but not in power”.
Before his announcement, the opposition Labour party had tabled a question for Truss to explain sacking Kwarteng. Bizarrely, she sent a deputy, Penny Mordaunt – a leadership rival and a possibility for the new PM – to answer on her behalf. Mordaunt said there were very good reasons why Truss couldn’t be there to answer in person – only for Truss to then arrive, but let Mordaunt carry on speaking on her behalf. By now a national newspaper was running a live YouTube video stream asking what would last longer, Truss as PM, or a supermarket lettuce.
Truss tried to rectify this with a TV interview in which she admitted there had been mistakes, but she had fixed them. This was news to everybody facing the prospect of higher mortgages.
With her authority draining away, Truss put up a better than expected performance in the weekly prime minister’s questions in parliament on Wednesday, but then in a bombshell development her home secretary, Suella Braverman, the equivalent of an interior minister, was sacked for sharing a secret government document on a private phone.
Braverman had run for leader against Truss, and had already been publicly criticising the government she was part of. On Tuesday she had launched a widely mocked rant against protesters as “tofu-eating wokerati”. Her Wednesday letter of departure was explosive, admitting she made a mistake, but laying down a gauntlet to Truss to resign over her own mistakes.
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