Liz Truss may be safe until Halloween but nightmare is far from over

theguardian.com:

When Liz Truss gathers her cabinet in Downing Street for a rare Monday meeting to shore up support and talk them through her radically changed plans for the Halloween budget, she will be trying to convince them she still has a grip on power.

Sacking Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor and bringing in Jeremy Hunt – who quickly buried key elements of her economic strategy, with tax rises and public spending cuts to come – was a necessary political sacrifice if she was to survive in No 10.

But making Hunt – regarded by Tory MPs as a safe pair of hands capable of calming turbulent markets – the most powerful chancellor of the modern era also underlines the weakness of Truss’s own position.

One minister suggested viewing Hunt as the chief executive of the government and Truss as its chair but as anybody in business knows, it is the former with their hands on the levers of power.

At best, Truss has bought herself more time in No 10 but that could just end up being more time waiting for Tory MPs to organise her removal. Mutinous backbenchers are already plotting how to oust her and deliberating over her replacement. “She still has to go, but she probably gets at least until the budget now,” predicted one.

Most Tory MPs never wanted her – she picked up just 113 votes out of a potential 355 in the final parliamentary round – and even her own supporters, including some in the cabinet, are privately asking what the point of her government now is given she has dumped her low-tax, small-state plans for the economy.

So while Hunt’s arrival has given Truss a temporary reprieve, the question is for how long. There is speculation that as many as 100 letters may already have gone in to the 1922 Committee chair, Sir Graham Brady, to try to trigger a