The government has removed a reference to Liz Truss’s mini-budget as having been “disastrous” in an official king’s speech document after the former prime minister complained that this was incorrect and a “flagrant breach” of the civil service code. Truss wrote to Simon Case, the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, calling on him to investigate the matter and for the wording to be removed. The object of Truss’s fury was a section in the 106-page official briefing notes to the king’s speech that set out the aims for the 40 bills being presented.
The description of the budget responsibility bill, which will make it mandatory for major fiscal changes to be checked in advance by the Office for Budget Responsibility, said it was “intended to capture and prevent those announcements that could resemble the disastrous Liz Truss mini-budget”. This fiscal statement in September 2022, with its planned £45bn of unfunded tax cuts, was followed by near panic on the bond markets, a slump in the pound and higher mortgage rates. In a section listing “key facts” about the bill, the king’s speech document said the mini-budget’s measures would have cost £48bn a year by 2027-28 “and damaged Britain’s credibility with international lenders”. In her letter to Case, Truss, who lost her South West Norfolk seat to Labour in this month’s election, said this characterisation was “untrue”, arguing that the negative impacts were not caused by her budget but were because of existing problems in the market for liability-driven investments “precipitated by the Bank of England’s regulatory failures”.
She went on: “I regard it as a flagrant breach of the civil service code, since such personal and political attacks have no place in a document prepared by civil servants – an error made all the more egregious when the attack is allowed to masquerade in the document among ‘key facts’. “Will you please urgently investigate how such material came to be included in this document, ensure suitable admonishment for those responsible and the immediate removal of such political material from the version of the document on gov.uk?” A Cabinet Office spokesperson said: “The cabinet secretary has responded to Liz Truss and directed for these references to be removed from the document. They have now been corrected and updated.” Within three weeks of the mini-budget, amid an escalating crisis, Truss sacked her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and replaced him with Jeremy Hunt. She then ditched one of the key elements of the mini-budget, the idea of scrapping the 45p top rate of income tax. Less than a week after that, Truss resigned as prime minister after just 45 days in the job, having lost the confidence of most of her MPs. She attended the Republican national convention in Milwaukee this week where Donald Trump was nominated as the party’s presidential candidate. She said his was “the leadership the west needs”.