How did you celebrate? With friends and family or quietly at home? It is a year today since Mary Elizabeth Truss became Prime Minister after winning the Conservative party leadership vote. Forty-nine days later she resigned after her and then Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget caused chaos in the financial markets.
Marking the anniversary there has been a lot of coverage.
POLITICO seemed obsessed, including a reminder of Truss’s “nine wildest moments”. It included King Charles’s awkward greeting: “So you’ve come back again?” followed by a sly “Dear, oh dear.” There was also a nod to the lettuce with a blonde wig and googly eyes that outlasted Truss’s premiership.
In London Playbook, Noah Keate gave us a rundown of Truss’s time since being sacked in numbers: “One 4,000-word Telegraph essay .. One Instagram post … One speech blaming “woke culture” for a high-tax economy … One Growth Commission launched … Interviews in Japan, America, Denmark and, of course, the U.K. … Three spoken contributions in parliament … Six registered visits outside the U.K. … 16 written questions … 41 Commons votes … 315 days since departing No 10 … £216,195.22 from speaking engagements … and a 26,195 majority to defend at the next election.”
Some of the key figures from the Truss experiment are still struggling to come to terms with what happened and what they did. In an interview on Tuesday night, Piers Morgan managed to draw blood from a stone and extract a half-hearted apology from a profusely sweating Kwasi Kwarteng. Before this apology, Kwarteng managed to suggest that his apology for the mini-budget would be as ludicrous as apologies for slavery.
Despite the chaos, there are still some willing to give Truss and her growth obsession the benefit of the doubt. The Telegraph ran a whole series of pieces making the case she was right but robbed.
In his column in the Times, Daniel Finkelstein took a pop at those revisionist takes. For Finkelstein, those claiming Truss’s ideas were right but the execution was wrong are completely misled. In essence: tax cuts have to be funded, he said, economic stagnation is more down to low investment than high taxes, and the demonisation of a supposed anti-growth coalition was nasty politics.
Until next year, happy Liz Truss day.
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