In her first newspaper interview since becoming Prime Minister, Liz Truss announced her plan to transform Britain into a low-tax, high-growth economy would reverse the “current trajectory of managed decline”. She suggested voters felt that “there has been a failure to address some of the fundamental issues that affect our country” and that Britain suffered from a “lack of dynamism”.
Truss had arrived in Birmingham for the annual Conservative Party Conference the previous evening. She told Laura Kuenssberg that she did “accept we should have laid the ground better, I do accept that.” Sitting across from her in the studio, Michael Gove said he was “profoundly concerned” and that the move was a “display of the wrong values”.
Meanwhile, Grant Shapps and Damian Green were amongst those MPs encouraging concern about the move. Although Truss took little heed of the latter at an afternoon meeting, Graham Brady that evening informed her that she did not have the numbers to pass her 45p tax cut. She summoned Kwasi Kwarteng to her hotel room and told him the policy was as “dead as a dodo”.
Truss addressed the annual ConservativeHome 1922 Committee Reception. Meanwhile, the news of the tax cut’s abandonment spread across the top floor of her hotel. Following a row between Harry Cole, The Sun’s political editor, and Adam Jones, the Number 10 director of communications, the former’s newspaper reported the axing of the 45p rate was dead
With acknowledgments to Harry Cole and James Heale‘s Out of the Blue: the Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss