Kwasi Kwarteng says he told Liz Truss she was going too fast

Former UK chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng said he warned ex-premier Liz Truss she needed to “slow down” her economic plans, and told her she was “mad” to fire him.

In his first interview since he was sacked in October, Kwarteng told TalkTV they had been wrong to go at “breakneck speed” with their tax-cutting agenda.

“She said, ‘Well, I’ve only got two years’ and I said, ‘You will have two months if you carry on like this,” Kwarteng said. In fact, Truss resigned less than four weeks after their disastrous fiscal statement on September 23, which triggered financial market turmoil and left people struggling with higher mortgage costs.

Kwarteng’s account runs counter to his public statements when he was in office.

Truss and Kwarteng’s plan for growth fused the biggest tax giveaway in half a century with Thatcherite deregulation, just as Britain faced an acute cost-of-living crisis. Investors balked at the proposals because they included no plan to get debt under control.

At the time, Kwarteng dismissed the reaction from investors and promised even more tax cuts. On September 25, he told the BBC there was “more to come,” triggering further turmoil when markets opened the next day.

“Looking back, hindsight is a wonderful thing, I think a measured pace would have been much better,” Kwarteng told TalkTV.

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