The new Tory shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith has received the ringing endorsement of the UK’s shortest serving prime minister Liz Truss.
Kemi Badenoch has carried out a major reshuffle of her shadow cabinet over the last couple of days, with the headline changes being Griffith replacing Mel Stride as shadow chancellor and Tom Tugendhat taking the place of Priti Patel as shadow foreign secretary.
Just like with much of the Tory shadow cabinet these days, you’d be forgiven for not knowing much about Griffith.
Perhaps all you need to know about the Arundel and South DownsΒ MP is this: he was one of the architects of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget.
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Griffith was financial secretary to the Treasury when Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s “economic growth plan” sparked a run on the gilt markets, a collapse in the value of the pound and rocketing interest rates in September 2022.
In the days after the announcement, Griffith went out to defend it, arguing it would deliver economic growth and benefit ordinary people.
So, it’s no surprise his appointment as shadow chancellor has been welcomed by Truss.
In a post on X, she wrote: “Congratulations to Andrew Griffith on becoming Shadow Chancellor. The economic establishment of the last three decades has failed Britain. They must be taken on.”
Reacting online, several joked that there probably couldn’t be a worse endorsement to get.
Since becoming Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch has been understandably keen to move the party on from Truss’s disastrous tenure and try to rebuild the Conservative Party’s credibility.
But maybe her new shadow chancellor is a sign that Badenoch might want to move back to Truss’s aggressive tax-cutting ideas.