“This was the best budget I have ever heard a chancellor deliver, by a massive margin,” wrote Allister Heath on the front page of the Daily Telegraph the day after Kwasi Kwarteng had outlined his plans for Britain’s fiscal future on 23 September.
“The tax cuts were so huge and bold, the language so extraordinary, that at times I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.”
Similarly, the Daily Mail hailed the budget in rich, laudatory terms. “At last, a real, Tory budget,” proclaimed its front-page headline while columnist Alex Brummer praised the “seismic” boldness of Kwarteng’s financial planning.
Today, these eulogies look embarrassingly misplaced. Kwarteng has been sacked after financial chaos triggered by that budget, while Truss’s premiership hangs by a thread – leaving many right-wing papers and columnists struggling to reposition themselves.
The Mail was the first to spot that the Truss-Kwarteng partnership was perhaps not the panacea they had hoped it would be. On 30 September Brummer denounced the pair’s decision not to give the Office for Budget Responsibility a hearing.
By last week, the Mail was accusing Truss of making humiliating U-turns and of making “a pig’s ear” of her ambitious mini-budget, while the Sun, which had initially welcomed her premiership, likened her to a dead parrot nailed to her perch by terrified Tories.
For his part, Heath, in the Telegraph, has made a little effort to justify his claims about Kwarteng’s “revolutionary” budget. Truss and Kwarteng were just unlucky, he argued on Friday. “They didn’t crash the economy – it was about to come tumbling down anyway,” he argued.
By contrast, Matthew Parris in the Times has proved remarkably consistent and, more importantly, prescient about Truss. Last December, he wrote of the future prime minister that “there is nothing there: nothing beyond a leaping self-confidence that is almost endearing its wide-eyed disregard for the forces of political gravity”. Then, last August, as it became clear she was likely to win the battle to become prime minister, he wrote: “She’s crackers. It isn’t going to work.”
Yesterday Parris clearly took no pleasure in the accuracy of his prophesy. “The prime minister is now close to falling,” he wrote. “She must be pushed.”
