All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
A day is a long time in politics. Just this morning, a No. 10 source told the BBC the Prime Minister believed Kwasi Kwarteng was doing ‘an excellent job’ as chancellor and the pair were ‘in lockstep.’ Only just a few hours on, Liz Truss has sacked her close ally and friend in a bid
Kwasi Kwarteng, we hardly knew ye. After 38 days, the Chancellor was unceremoniously axed from his post today as Liz Truss desperately tries to rescue her crumbling premiership. Memorable highlights of his five-week stint include the mini-Budget, firing Tom Scholar and being mistaken for Bernard Mensah. Indeed, the official mourning period appears in retrospect to
Kwasi Kwarteng’s sacking is brutal – and he was sacked as his letter makes clear. He was a chancellor who wanted to say yes to the Prime Minister, he deliberately did not try and build a power base for himself. But he has now been removed without ceremony, sacked even before he had returned to Downing
Can sacking Kwasi Kwarteng really save Liz Truss’s premiership? In the past few minutes, the chancellor has had a meeting with the Prime Minister – and he has now left the government. Tory MPs have spent the past week doing a lot of writing. The first thing many of them have been writing is a
As Tory MPs appear to descend into a panic of buyers’ remorse over the election of Liz Truss, they would be well advised to take a deep breath and reflect upon the absurdity of removing a leader after six weeks. As they do so, they might find it instructive to look across the sea to Australia
Liz Truss has sacked Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor. It is a truly remarkable development. Truss and Kwarteng were even more part of a joint political project than David Cameron and George Osborne. The mini-Budget was an expression of their joint beliefs: his dismissal is a sign of how bad things really are. Less than six
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It’s one of those flight tracker days here in Westminster as Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is about to land from a trip to the IMF in Washington, cut short last night. Is the government about to U-turn on its three-week-old mini budget? If so, will the Chancellor resign? Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Fraser
How bad is Irish nationalism’s sectarian problem? In the somewhat Panglossian world occupied by nationalist and republican activists and politicians – boosted by recent census and election results – it doesn’t really feature in the discussion. At the recent ‘Ireland’s Future’ conference in Dublin, attended by thousands of people, the grubby stuff – the legacy
Is silence still violence? I’m just wondering because this week Graham Norton was asked about the deluge of hateful slurs and threats that are frequently fired at JK Rowling and he dodged the issue. Instead he rambled on about how celebs should not comment on difficult topics like transgenderism. So was his silence on the
The Conservatives – in office since 2010 – are now into their fourth successive manifesto pledge to bring down immigration, which remains well over 200,000 annually. Naturally, Liz Truss is said to be weighing up increasing it further. Some of those in the Treasury believe that visa liberalisation is the quickest way to growth. From the Treasury’s
Poor Donald Trump. The 6 January committee has subpoenaed him. The New York attorney general is seeking to put the kibosh on his new Trump II organisation. The Supreme Court has rejected his bid to stymie the Mar-a-Lago investigation. What next? Will it turn out that Jared or even — gasp! — Ivanka has been
These are hard times for centrists, though we should be used to that by now. My tribe – clever, technocratic, sometimes liberal and sometimes smug – has been losing arguments and elections consistently for several years, often deservingly. We may know all about how policy works, but we haven’t been great at politics. A common
Higher interest rates are making borrowing less affordable, so the average buyer has less to spend on a new property. Halifax found that the house price reduction has already begun, with a 0.1 per cent drop last month. Falling house prices can be a harbinger of economic doom – this kind of decline usually signals
So, no Black Friday. The pound is steady, the FTSE100 up 1.5 per cent, the FTSE250 up more than 3 per cent. Just as fears grew that the end of the Bank of England’s gilt-buying programme could send pension funds to the brink and precipitate a fresh market crisis, the opposite happens: markets embark on
When Britain crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism on Black Wednesday, prime minister John Major phoned the Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie to ask how the day’s events would be covered. McKenzie is said to have responded: ‘Prime minister, I have on my desk in front of me a very large bucket of shit
It seems that panic and turmoil is something the markets and Tory party currently have in common. Kwasi Kwarteng is flying home a day earlier than planned from the annual meeting of the International Money Fund in Washington – so he will be back in London this afternoon when the Bank of England is due
There’s not much for the Tories to cheer about at the moment but there was little sign of the blues last night in Leicester Square. Members of Rishi Sunak’s campaign packed out the Londoner Hotel to toast their king over the water with glasses of English sparkling wine. In what his supporters insist was an
Kwasi Kwarteng has done an interview from Washington which will do nothing to calm speculation about an imminent U-turn on corporation tax. The Telegraph’s Szu Ping Chan reports that: In response to a question about how markets “have improved today because they think you’re about to do a U-turn on corporation tax”, Mr Kwarteng said: “Let’s
Who will take over the Evening Standard, the ailing London freesheet currently losing £14 million a year? One name floated by those in the know is a certain Boris Johnson. The chatter at the Northcliffe House is that the former PM decided against it, with one old hand suggesting that Johnson thought the paper was
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After a day of speculation, the rumours that Liz Truss was about to U-turn on more areas of the mini-budget proved untrue. Conservative MPs had a tense evening in the 1922 Committee meeting last night – are there any good options left for the Prime Minister? Isabel Hardman speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.
All financial crises have their peak days, the moment of drama when everything comes to a head. Think of Black Monday – 19 October 1987 – when the bottom fell out of global stock markets, or Black Wednesday – 16 September 1992 – when the pound crashed out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism. With the
Is Liz Truss about to U-turn? The Westminster grape vine is buzzing with informed speculation that the government is set to abandon more of the measures in the mini-Budget in an attempt to regain the confidence of the market and Tory MPs. I am told that members of Liz Truss’s political team who had previously resisted
Iran’s protestors are showing immense courage. That is a given. But the reasons why are worth spelling out. Not only do they have the bravery to demonstrate against a theocratic dictatorship which has veiled women against their will for over forty years; they also protest in the full knowledge that the regime has already killed
Can Channel 4 sink any lower? The TV channel has purchased a painting by Adolf Hitler so that a studio audience may decide whether to allow comedian Jimmy Carr to destroy it with a flamethrower. In other words, popular television is trolling the Jewish community, all those around the world who suffered under Nazism and anybody
Ye is the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Even more formerly, he was known as Yeezus, back when he was dropping tracks like ‘I Am A God’. But Kanye is not the messiah; he’s an extremely naughty boy. This week he appeared on US television show Tucker Carlson Tonight to attack Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role
NHS waiting lists have exceeded seven million people for the first time since records began. That means nearly 12 per cent of people in England are waiting for consultant-led treatment. A&E waiting times broke records too: nearly 33,000 people waited more than 12 hours from decision to admit to admission. The target is four hours.
Meetings between the monarch and the prime minister remain a closely-guarded secret. This means that anything that is caught on camera when King Charles and Liz Truss meet is watched closely – and the King’s choice of greeting to the PM when he hosted her at Buckingham Palace last night was, err, particularly interesting. King Charles
Liz Truss’s appearance before MPs at the 1922 committee was meant to be part of a wider charm offensive as she tries to get MPs back on side after a tricky start. With Labour enjoying a large poll lead and market turmoil dominating the news, Truss needs to keep her party behind her. Yet that
Liz Truss has just finished addressing the 1922 committee of Tory MPs. The mood among backbenchers afterwards was mixed. There was surprise among them that there hadn’t been more of an effort by the whips to get supportive questions placed – something which happened even at the nadir of Theresa May’s fortunes. Instead, there were
Liz Truss faced her first proper grilling at PMQs. Her debut, last month, was a softball affair but today Keir Starmer went in with both fists swinging. He asked her to endorse Jacob Rees-Mogg’s view that ‘turmoil in the markets has nothing to do with the Budget’. ‘What we have done,’ said Liz, pleasantly, ‘we
Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions taught us two things. The first was that Keir Starmer has still got a long way to go before he is the one putting Liz Truss on the ropes. The second is that Truss has got a long way to go before she isn’t putting herself on the ropes instead. It
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Did Liz Truss misspeak or did she mean it when she said that she wouldn’t go ahead with spending cuts, as promised in her leadership campaign? On the episode, Cindy Yu talks to James Forsyth and Katy Balls about what the Prime Minister could have meant, given the need to balance the books to pay