Kwasi Kwarteng, Chancellor of the Exchequer for 43 of Liz Truss’s 49 days as British prime minister, said Truss “basically” fired him “on Twitter,” a dismissal he called “Trump-like” in his speed and brutality as Britain fell into crisis.
Kwarteng said: “One of the things I feel bad about, among other things, was that she capitulated very quickly [to pressure to sack him]. So I went back and got fired, basically on Twitter. So, kind of like Trump.”
Kwarteng and Truss were close political allies and friends who entered parliament together in 2010, rose as ministers under successive Conservative prime ministers, then took over after Boris Johnson was forced out.
Truss became Prime Minister on 6 September 2022. She appointed Kwarteng to the Ministry of Finance, only to fire him just over a month later, on October 14, amid a financial crisis brought on by the “mini-budget” the two introduced.
Trot didn’t issue a tweet announcing Kwarteng’s firing before telling him – like Trump famously did to his subordinates while he was president of the United States – but Kwarteng nevertheless learned of his dismissal from a journalistic post.
Kwarteng describes the events of One solutionpodcast co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, and reporter Julia Macfarlane.
It came as Kwarteng rushed back to the UK from an International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington.
“I was supposed to come back on Saturday morning,” he said, “and I came back on Friday morning and was taken to Downing Street and basically fired.
“But on the way to Downing Street, I saw on Twitter, I think it was Steve Swinford from [London] The Times had said… “Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng sacked” [or] “was fired” or “is fired”, I don’t know what time it was. But the message was clear.
Kwarteng’s subsequent meeting with Truss was “final”, he said, with no sense for the prime minister to change his mind. Their friendship is wide reported not to have survived.
Kwarteng said he was “surprised because it was obvious to me that after I got fired, it was over for her. So I was kind of a little leery. I was thinking, ‘You’ve just destroyed your premiership. There is no going back.’
Kwarteng said: “I think I said to her or maybe to [special adviser] after that she was about three weeks old … and of course I was wrong. It was six days.
A farm resigned on October 20.
In his interview with One Decision, Kwarteng repeated admissions of mistakes made with Truss, most notably the speed with which they tried to deliver their economic plans, which centered on cutting taxes and increasing spending, such as thus panicking the markets.
However, he insisted that he and Truss were right to say that Britain’s economy needed austerity measures.
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Trot has made similar statements, including in a a widely criticized new bookTen Years to Save the West, in which she revealed how Queen Elizabeth II advised her to “your pace”, advice given two days before the monarch died.
Kwarteng said Truss “recognized that this was the right advice. But of course, hindsight is a beautiful thing. And we’ve moved on and we’ve all made mistakes and we have to be honest about that.”
Kwarteng’s description of his dismissal as “Trumpian” may draw comment given Truss’s high-profile attempt to profile on the far right of American politicsamid Trump’s third presidential campaign.
Quarteng will leave parliament in the next elections due this year. Sunak’s government is struggling in the polls, expected to lose power to Labour. But Kwarteng had a warning for the prime minister about a threat to his right.
Saying there won’t be removed the whip from Lee Andersonthe former Conservative Party deputy leader who made allegedly Islamophobic comments about London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Kwarteng said Anderson’s new party, the hard-right Reform UKposed a threat to Sunak.
“I think they are a big problem,” Kwarteng said, although he said he did not think Reform would win seats at Westminster given Britain’s lack of proportional representation.
Kwarteng said: “All over the western world you have centre-right parties that are quite vulnerable to the more right-wing parties … on issues of identity, immigration and other social issues.
“We [the Conservatives] we were under 20 when I left office and when Liz Trust left office and today we are under 20. And the reason why we don’t seem to have made any progress in these 18 months, I think, can be largely explained by this phenomenon, this Reform Party.
