Will sacking Kwarteng be enough to save Truss’s premiership?

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 letter to Sir Graham Brady calling for a vote of no confidence. Even though the rules currently don’t allow one for a year after the election of a new leader, those who’ve sent their missives expect that he will reach a point where he has to tell the Prime Minister there would be a vote if it weren’t for that rule – and that the time has come to do something. 

The second bit of writing is a list of things Truss can do to save her skin. Almost all of those I’ve spoken to over the past few days have included ‘get a new Chancellor’ on that list. Yesterday, it seemed No. 10 had agreed with that notion, with aides suggesting to supportive Tory MPs that the current turmoil needed to be blamed squarely on Kwarteng to give Truss a chance of a reset.

But there are two problems with this. The first is one that James identifies here, which is that Truss and Kwarteng embarked on this project together, with the chancellor doing exactly what the Prime Minister asked of him. Their closeness was briefed repeatedly, the chances of them disagreeing on their central economic mission dismissed. How does Truss U-turn, not just on the policy or the appointment, but also on that characterisation of her relationship with Kwarteng?

The second problem is that priced into the long shopping list of things that could enable Truss to keep going to the next election is the assumption that the Tories will nevertheless lose that election. An amalgamation of the lists that I’ve been given runs thus:

• Get a new chancellor.
• Get more advisers in No. 10 (after making a big deal of slimming down the operation).
• Get a proper comms operation (it is currently being run largely without permanent staff).
• Get a new chief whip (Wendy Morton is variously described as ‘too nice’, ‘too weak’, and lacking the ‘savviness needed to whip the unwhippable’).
• Get other, more experienced whips.
• Get some proper outriders in the party groups that would naturally be supportive of Truss.

These are the changes that a prime minister is often urged to make in the mid-term, not after only a few weeks in the job. They are also, to put it mildly, comprehensive. Supporters and sceptics alike agree Truss needs to announce a full reset today. If she does this, her only option for that reset is a government that isn’t particularly ambitious or radical. And even with a different set of radical measures, the Prime Minister has permanently lost the trust of her MPs that she will be able to carry them out properly.