Was Kwasi Kwarteng to blame for the mini-Budget fallout?

In his interview with Tom Newton-Dunn of Talk TV, Kwasi Kwarteng is clearly right about one thing: his sacking hastened the end of the Truss premiership. Sacking a Chancellor is a dramatic, and risky, move for a Prime Minister at the best of times. But when the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are known to have been in lockstep, it is particularly risky. Truss could never answer the question of why, if Kwarteng had to go over the mini-Budget, she did not.  

What is also right is that Kwarteng was more prepared to talk about spending cuts than Truss was. If the mini-Budget had just been his, it would almost certainly have included the tax cuts but would also have had a greater emphasis on spending restraint – whether that would have been enough to reassure the markets without more specifics is uncertain.  

Kwarteng argues that with gilt yields having come down, the effects of the mini-Budget are now out of the system. But this is not quite right. The fallout from the mini-Budget means that the markets will be looking for more specifics from the Chancellor on Thursday about his future plans than they would have been before this whole episode.