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Liz Truss’s spurned former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has taken aim at the ex-PM for sacking him in a “kind of Trumpian” manner.
Truss appointed Kwarteng as her chancellor as soon as she was elected – but she gave him the boot just 43 days later, blaming him for the chaos of their mini-budget of £45m of unfunded tax cuts.
Not that this decision saved the ex-PM’s skin. Six days after that, Truss was forced to resign herself and had to to hand the reins over to her Tory leadership rival Rishi Sunak.
Still, more than a year later, Kwarteng has said his rapid departure from government was “one of the things that I feel bad about” because Truss reacted so quickly to the pressure to remove him.
Speaking to the One Decision podcast, Kwarteng compared his sacking to the way ex-US president Donald Trump famously fired his own members of staff while in the White House.
He explained that he was returning from a meeting in Washington with the International Monetary Fund when he scrolled through social media – and saw messages about his own future in politics.
He said: “I was sacked, essentially on Twitter. So, kind of Trumpian.”
Kwarteng continued: “I was due back on the Saturday morning, and I came back on the Friday morning and I was driven to Downing Street and I was essentially sacked.
“But on the way to Downing Street, I could see on Twitter, I think it was Steve Swinford of the Times had said… ‘The chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, sacked’ [or] ‘was sacked’ or ‘has been sacked’ – I don’t know what tense it was but the message was clear.”
The ex-chancellor said his meeting with the then prime minister after that was “definitive”.
While Truss did not actually tweet that she was going to fire Kwarteng before she announced it to him (like Trump), the ex-chancellor did still find out via social media.
The two were close allies, having both entered parliament as new Tory MPs in 2010 and rising through the ranks of government together.
It seems they were destined to leave government together, too – as Kwarteng told the podcast, “it was obvious to me that once I’d been sacked it was over for her”.
The ex-chancellor has mostly avoided the spotlight since then, and has announced he will be stepping down as an MP at the next general election.
Truss, meanwhile, has been focused on appealing to a more right-wing audience, reforming her image and promoting her new book Ten Years To Save The West.
She has also endorsed Trump to be the next US president.
Both have refused to take responsibility for the chaos of their mini-budget, suggesting it was more the speed at which they introduced the reforms rather than the reforms themselves.
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