Kwasi Kwarteng has revealed he told Liz Truss to “slow down” and warned her she would “have two months” if she continued at the same rate with her radical mini-budget measures.
Kwarteng was sacked as chancellor last month by the then-prime minister after less than six weeks in the job, after the government’s £45bn tax cuts triggered economic turmoil, with government borrowing costs soaring and the pound plummeting to a 37-year low.
Truss subsequently resigned after 45 days in office, making her the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history.
In his first interview since he left office, Kwarteng told TalkTV: “After the mini-budget we were going at breakneck speed and I said, you know, we should slow down, slow down.
“She said, ‘Well, I’ve only got two years’ and I said, ‘You will have two months if you carry on like this’. And that is, I’m afraid, what happened.”
He added: “I think the prime minister was very much of the view that we needed to move things fast. But I think it was too quick.”
Kwarteng was Britain’s shortest serving chancellor since 1970 and was replaced by Jeremy Hunt.
He said Truss was “very emotional” when she sacked him as chancellor and added he first learned of his firing via a tweet as he travelled to a meeting in Downing Street.
Kwarteng said: “I can’t remember whether she was actually shedding tears but she was very emotional and it was a difficult thing to do.
“I think she genuinely thought that that was the right thing to buy her more time to set her premiership on the right path.
“I disagreed, obviously. I thought that if chancellors are sacked by the prime minister for doing what the prime minister campaigned on, that leaves the prime minister in a very weak position.”
On his disastrous mini-budget, Kwarteng acknowledged “there was turbulence and I regret that”.
He said: “I do feel sorry actually for the people who are going through this difficult time in terms of remortgaging.
“I think that it is a really stressful thing to do.”
The MP for Spelthorne, Surrey, added: “I’m responsible. I’m not gonna wash my hands [of] it.
“I was chancellor of the exchequer. I was also part of the top team. But looking back I think we could have had a much more measured approach.”
But he said that Hunt, and the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, could not blame Truss’s government for the black hole in the nation’s finances.
“The only thing that they could possibly blame us for is the interest rates and interest rates have come down and the gilt rates have come down,” he said. “The black hole and structural problems are already there. I mean, it wasn’t that the national debt was created by Liz Truss’s 44 days in government.”
Read More: Kwarteng told Truss to ‘slow down’ radical measures after mini-budget
