Liz Truss on those Kwasi Kwarteng rumours: He’s a close friend... that’s it
LIZ TRUSS has moved to quell speculation about her friendship with former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng – which helped to foster the resentment of powerful establishment figures she says helped to oust her as Prime Minister.
Ms Truss tells The Reaction, presented by Andrew Pierce, that Whitehall rumours that she and Mr Kwarteng had been more than just colleagues were unfounded.
She has argued in her new book, Ten Years To Save The West, which is being serialised by the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, that the Treasury and Bank of England helped to bring her Premiership to a premature end by opposing policies and blocking appointments.
‘Treasury officials guard the Chancellor closely and were clearly alarmed by my close working relationship with Kwasi,’ she wrote.
In response to Mr Pierce saying ‘lots of people speculated about you and Kwasi Kwarteng... some suggested you were closer to him than some people might have thought’, Ms Truss says: ‘He is a close friend of mine. That’s it.’
She sacked him as Chancellor in the dying days of her time in office, in a doomed effort to halt market turmoil which greeted his tax-cutting mini-Budget, bringing an effective end to their friendship.
In the interview, Ms Truss defends their attempt to shake up the Treasury, including the controversial sacking of Permanent Secretary Tom Scholar, who instantly became a dangerous enemy.
She recounts her tears over the Queen’s death in her first week at No10 and how because her phone had been ‘compromised’, she was unable to message her colleagues during those critical early days.
‘There was a fear my phone had been hacked, so I didn’t necessarily have people’s contact numbers. I was quite cut off,’ she says.
She also criticises the lack of support for British leaders, describing it as ‘appalling’ that Boris Johnson was left alone in Downing Street when he caught Covid and almost died.
‘There are expectations that the British Prime Minister effectively acts a bit like the American President, but they don’t have anything like the level of support and ability to actually do that,’ she says.
In the book, Ms Truss says the Queen warned her to ‘pace yourself’, with Ms Truss adding: ‘Maybe I should have listened.’
She reveals that her husband, accountant Hugh O’Leary, predicted her Premiership ‘would all end in tears’, but he also ‘accepted that this was the moment I was expected to run and that if I didn’t, people would say I had bottled it’.
In today’s extracts, Ms Truss describes the antipathy of Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey.
She also tells how glasses of wine and Whitney Houston songs helped her survive the leadership debates and how she objected to being hugged by Sue Gray – then a senior Whitehall official, now chief of staff for Sir Keir Starmer – when she was demoted by Theresa May from Justice Secretary to Chief Secretary to the Treasury. ‘I am not a hugger,’ says Ms Truss.
She details her long-running battles with Michael Gove, and her fury when he withdrew his support for Mr Johnson’s 2016 Tory leadership bid at the last moment.
Ms Truss writes that during the 2019 contest after Theresa May quit, she had a call from Mr Johnson, ‘who asked if I’d leaked something’. She adds: ‘I told him it had been Michael Gove – and what did he expect, given that Gove was a serial offender?
‘I pressed him: Did he think Gove had been leaking?
‘Mr Johnson replied: “Do bears s*** in the woods?”.’
‘My husband predicted it would end in tears’