Kwarteng ‘tries to rewrite history’ by blaming Truss for breakneck tax cuts

A CLOSE ally of Liz Truss has accused Kwasi Kwarteng of “rewriting history” after he warned her of going too fast with her disastrous economic plans.

The former chancellor said on Thursday that he had told Ms Truss to “slow down” after September’s mini-budget and said it was “mad” to fire him.

But a colleague of the former prime minister hit back this morning, saying the pair had been in “lockstep”.

“There’s a lot of rewriting history being done,” the friend said. “Liz and Kwasi were in lockstep on the minibudget.”

The ally said Mr Kwarteng’s argument did not stack up because he had agreed to the whole of the mini-budget, which included tax-cutting measures, without laying out how to pay for them.

After the mini-budget, the only further action that was taken was to reverse bits of it. “The part he is right about is the national debt and spending cuts that need to be found, which aren’t because of the Truss government but rather the decisions of successive governments before that and the legacy of Covid,” the ally said.

“Interest rates and gilts are back to where they were pre-mini-budget.”

Speaking to Talktv, Mr Kwarteng said that he had warned Ms Truss about going at a “breakneck speed” with economic measures after the mini-budget.

“She said, ‘Well, I’ve only got two years’ and I said, ‘You will have two months if you carry on like this’. And that is, I’m afraid, what happened.”

He also said: “I think the prime minister was very much of the view that we needed to move things fast. But I think it was too quick.”

Mr Kwarteng, a longtime political associate of Ms Truss, revealed she was “distressed and emotional” when she called him in to be fired, after summoning him from a trip to the United States.

He also revealed he found out he was going to be sacked when he saw a journalist tweeting about it while he was in the car going to Downing Street. He said he had told her: “This is mad. Prime ministers don’t get rid of chancellors.”

Yesterday morning Jeremy Hunt, Mr Kwarteng’s successor as Chancellor, rejected his claim that the short-lived Truss administration cannot be blamed for the UK’S economic difficulties.

Mr Kwarteng told Talktv: “The only thing that they could possibly [blame us for] is the interest rates but interest rates have come down, the gilt rates have come down.

“The black hole and the structural problems were already there ... the national debt wasn’t created by Liz Truss’s 44 days in government.”

Asked about Mr Kwarteng’s comments, Mr Hunt said: “[When] we produced a fiscal statement that didn’t show how we were going to bring our debts down over the medium term, the markets reacted very badly and so we have learned that you can’t fund either spending or borrowing without showing how you are going to pay for it and that is what I will do.”