Liz Truss says she is “not claiming to be blameless in what happened” in a 4,000-word essay blaming other people for her turbulent and short-lived premiership.
Her article for The Sunday Telegraph, which is hardly the mea culpa that some might have expected following her chaotic 49-day tenure in No 10, identified a series of culprits far and wide who, she argues, led to her government being made a “scapegoat” for longstanding economic woes.
They start off with the Bank of England, which she said failed to curb inflation by cutting interest rates more aggressively in line with the US Federal Reserve.
There were the Treasury officials who failed to alert her to the exposure of pension funds to so-called “liability-driven investments”, which meant the Bank had to make an emergency intervention to stop them falling over when her disastrous mini-budget sent the cost of government borrowing soaring.
There was the Office for Budget Responsibility, whose official economic forecasts undervalued the kind of reforms she was propagating resulting in an “inexorable” cycle of tax rises.
Then there was the Downing Street communications machine, which she said was unenthusiastic about her radical agenda for tax cuts and de-regulation and was not up to the task of explaining to voters what she was trying to achieve.
Although she didn’t say it herself, the Telegraph also blamed the “left-wing economic establishment” for her woes leading to a flurry of reactions on social media.
We’ve rounded up the best of them below:
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