Liz Truss has admitted one particular issue could have stopped her from pressing ahead with her disastrous mini-budget.
The ex-prime minister – who was ousted from office after just 49 days, having crashed the economy with her £45m of unfunded tax cuts – is currently trying to rehabilitate her image while she promotes her book, Ten Years To Save The West.
Despite repeatedly refusing to acknowledge her own role in the chaotic mini-budget, last night, Truss did finally suggest she did not have access to all the facts before unveiling the policy.
ITV’s Robert Peston asked the former PM: “If you had been told about that markets’ vulnerability, do you think it would have stopped you from doing the mini-budget?”
Research released this year found pension funds fell dramatically in value in 2022, partly because bond markets were spooked by Truss’s unfunded tax cuts.
The former PM replied: “If I had known about the extent of that vulnerability, the fact that there was essentially a tinderbox there, with the pensions issue...”
She paused, before adding: “Looking at it in hindsight, clearly that issue needed to be sorted out first.”
Peston pushed: “It is extraordinary that you didn’t know about it, did you?”
She said: “I didn’t know about it and Kwasi [Kwarteng] didn’t know about it, so we were completely blindsided.”
Truss tried to blame her then-chancellor entirely for the mini-budget disaster and fired Kwarteng just 38 days after appointing him.
While promoting her book, the former PM has also called anyone who thinks she crashed the economy either “very stupid or very malevolent”.
She has also blamed the “deep state” for the economic chaos which defined her premiership and called for an investigation into the Bank of England’s role in the aftermath of the crisis.
The independent Bank of England previously said the UK was “hours” away from financial crisis after Truss’s mini-budget.
It managed to steer the country into clearer waters by making an emergency intervention and offering up to buy up to £65 billion of government bonds to protect some pension funds.