Since leaving office, Truss has increasingly blamed the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) and other officials for causing the extremely negative market reaction to the mini-budget, which offered £45bn of unfunded tax cuts.
She said it was “complete economic illiteracy” to blame her. “When I got into government, taxes were ready at a 70-year high … the debt was going up,” she said. “I tried to turn that around, but the mini-budget was not implemented because organisations like the Bank of England sought to blame their mistakes on me, and the media, what you’d call the political class in Britain, went along with that narrative.”
Truss called for the OBR, the government’s fiscal watchdog, to be abolished. “Conservatives won’t succeed until we get rid of the Office for Budget Responsibility,” she said.
Claiming she had had a mandate to take on such institutions after Conservative members picked her over Sunak to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister, Truss said: “What I found was that those people and institutions were very powerful. They sought to undermine me, and at the same time people in the Conservative party wanted to buy into that narrative, but they are fundamentally wrong.”
Asked about the four candidates vying to succeed Sunak now as party leader, Truss said they needed to be more radical, for example by looking at scrapping or amending the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act. She said candidates also needed to combat “the wokery marching for our institutions, the human rights culture embedded in government”.
“So far, I haven’t seen any of the candidates really acknowledge how bad things are in the country as a whole, and frankly, for the Conservative party,” she said.
Truss added: “I am a huge fan of Javier Milei. If Milei was standing in the Conservative leadership election, I would be backing him like a shot. On everything, he’s doing the right thing.”
For the most part, the candidates have avoided much direct criticism of Truss. But on Monday, Robert Jenrick told ITV’s Peston show that her mini-budget “did great harm to our reputation for sound management of the public finances – it was cack-handed, it was careless and it was unconservative.”
Asked why Truss still seemed popular with some party members, he replied: “She’s not a member of parliament any more and I think we have to move on from that.”
