Trussonomics: who were doomed mini-budget’s biggest cheerleaders?
In a final blow to so-called Trussonomics, the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has announced he is reversing almost all the tax measures in his predecessor’s mini-budget.
In less than four weeks, it damaged the UK’s reputation across the world, caused untold carnage on the financial markets and left the prime minister clinging on by her fingertips.
Although many warned the budget was doomed from the start, there were also plenty of cheerleaders who greeted it with breathless enthusiasm in late September. Here is a reminder of the greatest champions of Liz Truss and her former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s economic project.
The Mail trumpeted its enthusiasm for Kwarteng’s mini-budget across two front pages. The first headline, on the morning of the announcement on 23 September, heralded the “biggest tax cuts in 30 years!” – which the paper predicted would “turbo-charge growth” rather than precede a sterling crash.
The following day, the Mail front page said: “At last! A true Tory budget.”
The newspaper’s City editor, Alex Brummer, wrote: “The boldness and courage of Kwasi Kwarteng’s debut budget is seismic,” and erroneously predicted it would result in “lifting confidence and sparking a surge in consumption and investment”.
Heath declared Kwarteng’s ill-fated mini-budget to be the greatest in his lifetime “by a massive margin”.
“The tax cuts were so huge and bold, the language so extraordinary, that at times, listening to Kwasi Kwarteng, I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, that I hadn’t been transported to a distant land that actually believed in the economics of Milton Friedman and FA Hayek.”
Heralding the end of “the neo-Brownite consensus of the past 20 years, the egalitarian redistributionist obsession, the
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