The government has removed “disastrous” references to Liz Truss’s mini-budget from an official King’s speech document after the former prime minister complained that her mini-budget was incorrect and a “blatant breach” of the civil service code. and.
Truss wrote to cabinet secretary and head of the civil service Simon Keyes, calling on him to investigate the matter and remove the wording.
The target of Truss’s ire was a section of the 106-page official briefing note of the King’s Speech, which lists the objectives of the 40 proposed bills.
The description of the Budget Responsibility Act, which would force the Office for Budget Responsibility to check major fiscal changes in advance, says it is “designed to catch and prevent announcements that could resemble the disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget.” .
The September 2022 fiscal statement, which planned £45bn of unfunded tax cuts, was followed by a near-panic in bond markets, a plunge in sterling and rising mortgage rates.
In a section setting out “key facts” about the bill, the King’s Speech document said the mini-budget measure would cost £48bn a year by 2027-28 “and damage the UK’s credibility with international lenders”.
Truss, who lost this month’s election to Labor, said in a letter to Case that the characterization was “untrue” and that she believed the negative impact was not caused by her budget but by market conditions. Some of the problems stemmed from liability-driven investments “caused by regulatory failures at the Bank of England.”
She continued: “I consider this a blatant breach of the Civil Service Code as such a personal and political attack has no place in a document prepared by a civil servant – a mistake made all the more egregious when the attack is allowed to pass for a civil servant .
“Can you please urgently investigate how such material came to be included in this document, ensure that those responsible are appropriately warned and that such political material is immediately removed from gov.uk’s version of the document?”
A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said: “The Cabinet Secretary has responded to Liz Truss and directed that these references be removed from the document. They have now been corrected and updated.
Within three weeks of the mini-budget, as the crisis escalated, Truss sacked Prime Minister Kwasi Quarten and replaced him with Jeremy Hunt. She then abandoned one of the key elements of the mini-budget, the idea of scrapping the 45p top tax rate.
Less than a week later, Truss resigned as prime minister after just 45 days in office, losing the trust of most MPs.
She attended the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week, where Donald Trump was nominated as the party’s presidential candidate. She said he was “the leadership the West needs”.
