Liz fucking Truss then.....

[johnsusername]

4 minutes ago, magicrat said:

Probably and the Tories will be painted as the party of law and order.    

Are there any police left? Outside of the match, I couldn't tell you that last time I've seen a copper. 

[magicrat]

3 minutes ago, johnsusername said:

Are there any police left? Outside of the match, I couldn't tell you that last time I've seen a copper. 

I think they look like this.

[Kepler-186]

[Sugar Ape]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kwasi-kwartengs-budget-day-cocktail-party-with-financiers-who-profited-from-crash-kwdbs72g0
 

Kwasi Kwarteng’s ‘budget day’ cocktail party with financiers who profited from crash

 

Kwasi Kwarteng attended a private champagne reception hours after delivering his mini-budget where hedge fund managers who would gain from a crash in the pound egged him on to commit to his plans.

 

The chancellor also gave guests insights about forthcoming government spending cuts during the event, which took place at the Chelsea home of Andrew Law, a financier and Conservative Party donor, on the evening of Friday, September 23.

 

The disclosure raises questions about Kwarteng’s political judgment. It will also raise concern that the event informed his decision to announce plans for even bigger tax cuts despite the market’s negative reaction to his initial plans. 
 

Kwarteng declared there was “more to come” in an interview on the Sunday after his mini-budget — a move that some No 10 officials blame for triggering a further fall in the pound on Monday morning.
 

Sterling collapsed to its lowest level since 1985 amid market turmoil which, alongside Kwarteng’s £45 billion tax giveaway for the highest earners, benefited many of those at the drinks event.
 

After the reception on Friday, at least two prominent hedge fund bosses told City associates that Kwarteng was “a useful idiot”. A senior Tory who advises business leaders said the phrase was in widespread circulation.

 

Law is worth about £750 million and has donated £3.6 million to the Tories since 2004. He has acknowledged taking short positions on the pound over recent years, meaning he has profited from the currency’s decline in value.

 

He invited about 30 people to his west London home for the drinks reception, including the stockbroker Howard Shore; the Swiss-born London banker Sir Henry Angest; Lord Leigh of Hurley, a corporate financier; Selva Pankaj, a merchant banker and investor; and Jake Berry, the Conservative Party chairman.

 

Others present included William Salomon, a senior partner at Hansa Capital, and Andrew Dawber, director of Civitas Investment Management. The event was also attended by representatives from the property, hospitality, healthcare and education sectors.

 

Guests drank wine, champagne and cocktails as they congratulated Kwarteng on the reforms he had outlined in the House of Commons.

 

According to a source, the ambience was “very, very positive”. Another said guests explicitly told Kwarteng to “double down” — an approach from which some stood to make enormous profits.

 

Two sources say Kwarteng described the Friday as a “great day for freedom”. A third said: “He was high on adrenaline. His big thing was: ‘Look, we’re not going to do stuff incrementally. We really believe in this stuff and that’s what we’re going to do.’ ”

 

Kwarteng is also said to have warned those present of austerity-style budget cuts to come. A source said: “He wanted to give an unadulterated message of ‘growth, growth, growth’, and that’s why he didn’t talk about savings, because otherwise the [news] agenda would have been all about savings — ‘where will you cut? What will you cut? Blah blah blah’ — they’re fully aware they have to make savings.”

 

The source added that Kwarteng appeared tired but pleased in a convivial atmosphere.

 

After the mini-budget, Treasury sources briefed national media organisations that Kwarteng had crossed the road and had a pint with officials, but they declined to volunteer details of the event he subsequently attended. As it was a party, officials would not be required to disclose it on ministerial transparency returns.

 

The chancellor went on to tell the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that he would slash more taxes, and confirmed he would neither bring forward his November budget nor ask the Office of Budget Responsibility to publish its forecasts of his plans.

 

His actions led the Bank of England to take action — at a cost of £65 billion — to calm the markets and prevent a meltdown in the UK pensions sector.

 

A source who attended the Law drinks party said Kwarteng seemed surprised by the reaction of the markets. “I think maybe he didn’t see it coming,” he said.

 

Allies of the chancellor have dismissed claims that his proximity to hedge fund managers has influenced his decision-making in office.

 

Last week, it was revealed that during the leadership contest he privately dined with Crispin Odey, a hedge fund investor and Kwarteng’s former boss, who has since said that bets against UK government bonds were the “gifts that keep on giving”.

 

Odey, a prominent Tory donor who also gave £870,000 to pro-Brexit campaign groups, founded the hedge fund Odey Asset Management, where Kwarteng worked before entering politics.

 

The latest revelations will heap more pressure on the chancellor, who was the co-author with Liz Truss of a financial package that has seen the Conservative Party fall to its lowest rating in the polls since the 1990s. No 10 insisted last week that he will not resign.

 

Tory officials confirmed that Kwarteng attended the gathering at Law’s home, which was arranged by the Conservative Party’s campaign headquarters, for an hour to talk through his mini-budget plans, giving a five-minute speech.

 

A source close to the chancellor said: “Any suggestion attendees had access to privileged information is total nonsense. The Growth Plan [published earlier that day] included a commitment to review our tax code to make it simpler, better for families and more pro-growth. The government’s ambitions on lowering the tax burden are hardly a state secret.”

[Anubis]

I’m sorry but he needs to be investigated for insider trading. This is unconscionable.

[Section_31]

We need Michelle O'Neil over here with her big bazookas.

[Sugar Ape]

Truss was told: don’t do this. Her attitude was: I don’t care | News | The Sunday Times (thetimes.co.uk)

 

Truss was told: don’t do this. Her attitude was: I don’t care

 

With her first big policy announcement the prime minister wanted to do “something huge”. Now Tories are worried and Labour are delirious

 

*

 

Liz Truss was heading to a British Gas site in Kent to highlight the government’s energy price cap intervention when she expressed irritation that the markets had responded to her previous week’s budget by sinking the pound and sending pension funds to the brink of collapse.

 

“We had to do something huge on energy because people and businesses are worried and the cost of not acting would have been enormous. That was the biggest element to the statement,” the prime minister said on Friday. “Markets surely get that?”

 

What the markets “got” was a case of the chills from the chancellor’s announcement that he was abolishing the 45p top rate of tax and borrowing £72 billion to pay for a swathe of other tax cuts, with no mention of how any of it would be paid for.

 

After delivering the budget, Kwasi Kwarteng attended a drinks party with leading city financiers, arranged by the Conservative Party treasurer’s department, in which he declared: “This is a great day for freedom.”

 

In the seven days between the chancellor’s party, and the PM’s site visit, it was not just the markets and the currency which collapsed. Trust in Truss has nosedived with Tory MPs and the public. Conservative poll ratings have plunged to 21 per cent, their lowest level in a quarter of a century and the Labour lead has doubled to 33 points, landslide terrain. By the end of the week, delirious Labour officials were referring to the affair as “the Trussterf***”.

 

While the savagery of the market reaction surprised most people in 10 Downing Street, both Truss and Kwarteng were warned that they risked an adverse reaction to slashing taxes and pushing supply side reforms to boost growth, without the independent Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) giving an assessment of the impact on the public finances.

 

“Senior Treasury officials made clear there was a big risk,” a senior Tory said. “The cabinet secretary [Simon Case] made it clear that there was a huge risk. You can do what you said in the leadership election — reverse the national insurance rise and stop the corporation tax rise — but once you get into further tax cuts you have to have someone mark your homework.”

 

Far from deterred, Truss seems to have fed off the prospect of negative fallout, using it as evidence that the establishment would always fight real economic radicalism. “She was told, ‘Don’t do this, no one will like it.’ And her attitude was basically, ‘I don’t care’.” Downing Street sources do not confirm this form of words but agree Truss’s attitude was that the economy would have to weather an initial period of turbulence.

 

Upon learning what was intended, a very senior civil servant declared privately: “She is completely mad.” A senior figure at the Treasury called the decision to scrap the top rate of tax in a cost-of-living crisis “f***ing insane,” the day before the budget. Another said the unfunded tax cuts were “what Venezuela does”.

 

While Truss’s political team are much more supportive, even some of them are queasy about the certainty with which she and her chancellor hold their views. “Usually advisers are the crazy ones and the politicians take the pragmatic view, but it’s Kwasi and Liz who are the most out there,” a former No 10 official said. “They are calling Liz and Kwasi ‘the terrorists’.”

 

Kwarteng also had warnings. Gerard Lyons, an economist close to Truss, contacted Downing Street on the Monday before the budget after taking soundings from hedge fund managers. He warned that the markets had not priced in cuts to either the basic rate of income tax, or an abolition of the additional rate. Lyons said: “I warned them clearly about the febrile state of the markets — to not spook the markets, to keep them onside, to outline clear fiscal principles and to address their concerns about institutions.”

 

Kwarteng did not listen. One ally said he had not read Lyons’s memo, but it is understood that he replied to it.

 

Then, on Sunday, the chancellor went even further, boasting that there were more tax cuts “to come”. If this was controversial, his attendance at a drinks event shortly before his gung-ho broadcast outing is more so. Senior Tories say that when the chancellor attended the donor drinks do on budget day, he spoke to several hedge fund managers who were shorting the pound. Many sources at the event say the financiers “egged him on” and told Kwarteng he should “double down” despite the collapse of the pound to $1.08 that day.

 

When the markets opened on Monday morning, the pound plunged further to $1.037, a move that would have made those financiers millions. At least two hedge fund bosses privately described the chancellor as “a useful idiot” in conversations with city associates.

 

To his credit, however, by Monday lunchtime Kwarteng had realised that he needed to issue a statement to clarify that he would publish an update of the government’s growth plans on November 23, along with an assessment by the OBR. But even that statement was initially resisted by Truss, whose instinct was to stand firm and say nothing.

 

Truss was still of this mind on Wednesday, when Treasury officials warned Kwarteng that pension funds were close to collapse. At 9.15am Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, called Kwarteng and he agreed the government would indemnify an intervention to buy up government bonds.

 

Even then, insiders say, Truss was refusing to countenance anything resembling a crisis meeting. “She doesn’t see it as a crisis,” a Whitehall source said. “Her view was: the markets will do what they do.” While the prime minister and chancellor met late morning, there was no emergency Cobra meeting and Truss found time to hold meetings on the Northern Ireland protocol and with Jacob Rees-Mogg, the business secretary, on post-Brexit deregulation, likely to involve watering-down workplace rights.

 

There were also discussions about sending Truss to Ukraine to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky before the Conservative Party conference this weekend. It is understood the prime minister was personally pushing to go. A Foreign Office source said: “She’s been saying, ‘I need to get out there as soon as possible like Boris did in order to show support.’ But we all know the reason is that just like Boris she is trying to distract everyone from the shit show.”

 

It was only on Thursday that Truss emerged to confront the issue in a series of interviews on BBC local radio and regional television. Her unsteady performance, complete with long silences, unnerved MPs. Dan Snow, the historian, declared it the “worst provincial campaign of any of our leaders since autumn 1216 when King John . . . caught dysentery in Norfolk, lost the crown jewels in The Wash and died in Nottinghamshire”.

 

When she had finished the marathon 24 interviews, Truss told aides outside the cabinet room: “Our plan is the right one but we need to bring people with us, we need to make our argument more effectively.”

 

Senior aides now acknowledge that they were “24 hours too late” to put Truss in front of a camera. It was not until Friday evening that the PM penned an article for The Sun, admitting her plans would cause “short-term disruption” but insisting she has an “iron grip” on the finances.

 

The problem is, she has already lost control of the politics, which means she may not get the opportunity to show what her economic theories can achieve. The reception for the 45p tax cut was so catastrophic that the government has had zero credit for the energy subsidy and plummeting support on Tory benches means Truss’s chances of getting supply side reform through the Commons is vastly diminished.

 

There are also serious structural problems in government that have left No 10 looking flat-footed. Some senior Tories believed the Bank of England refused to raise interest rates more than a week ago by the expected 0.75 per cent or 1 per cent (it went for 0.5 per cent) and declined to prop up the plummeting pound on Monday, because of irritation in the Bank about briefings against Bailey from within Team Truss during the leadership election. “He ducked it,” one well-connected Conservative said.

 

The sacking of Sir Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury, is also said to have caused problems. “Tom’s big focus wasn’t actually policy, it was liaising with the Bank and external markets and making sure the subterranean pipework of the system was working,” a Treasury official said. “That is precisely what has gone wrong this week.”

 

Insiders say Scholar was fired in part because Kwarteng believed he represented the Treasury orthodoxy he and Truss wanted to overturn. But there were two other reasons. One confidant said: “When Liz was No 2 in the Treasury she opposed Philip Hammond’s tax hikes and he and Scholar effectively froze her out. She was cut out of the loop on budget decisions.”

 

The final reason is even more remarkable: “Kwasi couldn’t handle how the rules were bent to help Scholar work from home.” For several years, Scholar was permitted to spend stretches of time working remotely from South America, where his wife and family moved, an arrangement that began under David Cameron and ended only in 2018. One former minister aware of the agreement joked he was the “pioneer of working from home”.

 

The crisis may now impact the search for Scholar’s successor. The chancellor interviewed four candidates on Thursday morning: James Bowler, who is tipped to replace Case as cabinet secretary; Antonia Romeo, Tamara Finkelstein and Jeremy Pocklington, the permanent secretaries at justice, the environment and levelling up.

 

An announcement is expected in about a week and Romeo, who is an economist and the most senior permanent secretary left in the running, remains the firm favourite with Kwarteng. She might be paired with a Treasury lifer as her deputy to stress continuity — but some in No 10 want someone less high-profile.

 

The bigger issue is that the Bank of England has said it will buy bonds for only two weeks, so ministers have to act fast to reassure the markets. The way they plan to do this, and the reason that Truss and Kwarteng refused to publish an OBR forecast, was that they claim it would have been only half the story because the rest of their growth plan involves a huge programme of deregulation.

 

Downing Street has already inked in days for eight supply side announcements on: childcare, immigration, business regulation, housing, mobile broadband, energy, financial services and agriculture — all of which are due before the end of October. They hope that will mean that the OBR predicts GDP growth of at least 2 per cent in 2023-24 when it delivers its assessment.

 

The issue for Truss and her team is that the political reaction to the 45p cut was so bad that legislation on planning reform and changes to workplace rights could fail in the face of Tory rebellion.

 

Senior Tories are this weekend sharing footage of the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special in which the inept pianist Eric Morecambe says: “I am playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order,” as a metaphor for Kwarteng’s handling of the affair.

 

Some of the ministers due to front the announcements are understood to be resistant to what No 10 has planned. Several Tory MPs are also in talks with Labour about joining forces to reinstate the 45p tax band. While a finance bill is usually regarded as a vote of confidence in the government, some in No 10 think this scenario can be avoided. “They want to say it’s not a confidence vote,” a senior Tory said. However, this view is not shared by the prime minister, who is determined to stand her ground and force her MPs into line.

 

The other way Truss and Kwarteng will try to convince the markets that there is a viable plan is by announcing spending cuts. The chancellor and his chief secretary, Chris Philp, are circulating letters to cabinet ministers demanding “efficiency savings”. When the PM and her chancellor met OBR bosses on Thursday they discussed £40 billion of cuts.

 

This has created despair among Truss’s external advisers. Lyons said: “Abandoning the Treasury orthodoxy was central to Liz Truss’s campaign but they have now empowered the Treasury orthodoxy. Under Treasury orthodoxy you either need to reverse tax cuts or have austerity. They don’t see fiscal policy as something dynamic. So I would imagine they are talking about spending cuts with the OBR. That’s like saying to the examiner, ‘What is the mark I need to get to pass?’”

 

The cuts are also politically damaging since they will fall heavily on welfare (where £5 billion can be saved by indexing them to earnings rather than inflation) and perhaps pensions. Simon Clarke, the levelling up secretary, told The Times on Saturday that Britain had lived in “a fool’s paradise” and must reduce the size of “very large welfare state”.

 

It was Philp who, during the leadership election, wrote a paper for Truss recommending the abolition of the 45p tax rate. “Now he’s got to find the money,” said a former No 10 aide. “We are now doing George Osborne-style austerity to pay for a tax cut for the super-rich.” Chris Curtis of pollsters Opinium agreed: “Cutting public services to give more money to rich people is about as politically toxic as it is possible to get.”

 

This has enraged Tory MPs, who think Truss and Kwarteng have already handed the next election to Sir Keir Starmer. Labour’s conference was by common consent the most upbeat since Tony Blair’s valedictory speech in 2006. Business was out in force while the hard left stayed away. “The twats in T-shirts have disappeared,” a member of the shadow cabinet observed.

 

The mini-budget broke on the eve of conference but only made Starmer’s job easier. “We were only too delighted to talk about nothing else,” a Labour official said. “Truss told us she would hit the ground. What she didn’t say was that she would take the pound with her.”

 

Recriminations are now rampant. Even some at the heart of Truss’s operation believe that “personnel changes” are “desperately needed” in No 10. One of them blamed “own goals after own goals” and predicted a “bloodbath”.

 

Senior civil servants are disparaging about Mark Fullbrook, the chief of staff, who is a veteran political campaigner but has no experience of Whitehall. “There is a noticeable failure of political leadership in No 10,” one said. It is understood Fullbrook did a deal with Truss to work from No 10 for 90 days before heading to Conservative campaign headquarters to run the general election campaign, so Truss is likely to need a new chief of staff by Christmas.

 

Some also want Truss to replace Wendy Morton, the chief whip, who is described as “reading out talking points” when she meets MPs rather than engaging properly.

 

Fullbrook has made a plea for unity, messaging MPs: “It is very clear to me that where people understand the plan and the logic behind it they are prepared to give it a chance. It’s our job together to set the record straight.” He vowed to send them “a useful graphic” to put on social media “several times a day”.

 

But there is little appetite for unity. At least 20 MPs have put in letters of no confidence in Truss, according to one source who is keeping track of the numbers. Since the Tories have lost several by-elections the figure needed to trigger a vote is now 54.

 

Former ministers are openly discussing what would happen if Truss was ousted. “There would have to be a leader by acclamation,” one said. “And it would have to be Boris or Rishi. She’s finished already.” Sunak, the former chancellor, might feel vindicated in his warnings about the dangers of Trussonomics. His allies announced he would not be coming to conference this weekend to “give Truss all the space she needs to own the moment”, as sophisticated a knifing as has ever been delivered in SW1. But as one Tory source observed: “Rishi won’t get points for being right — far from it.”

 

His absence from Birmingham does not mean Truss will have an easy ride. Michael Gove, who was exiled to the back benches, is planning nine different appearances at fringe meetings. “Gove is planning to let off a few grenades,” another former cabinet minister said. One of these will promote the publication of a report called Social Capitalism, which says the government needs a social policy to protect vulnerable communities alongside an economic plan if there are to be cuts. The report is backed by red wall MPs and social conservative loyalists like Danny Kruger who are “concerned about the libertarian economics we are getting” one MP said.

 

Yesterday Truss got on with the job, meeting the Danish prime minister. On Sunday she will try to sell her plan to viewers of Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC show. On Wednesday morning she will use her first conference speech to affirm, as an ally put it, “that fiscal responsibility is in the Conservatives’ DNA, including believing in sound money and a lean state”.

 

But she will also continue to claim that her unpopular budget will kickstart growth. “Britain’s economy needs a reset,” she said on Saturday before conference.

 

Truss and her team see the market reaction as “the economic orthodoxy fighting back”. As the prime minister left her Downing Street flat on Friday night she said to an aide: “People forget the counterfactual here. Doing nothing was not and is not an option. Change is difficult, I get that, but we need it. We will reassure people along the way.”

But the public may not be listening and Truss’s MPs are considering other counterfactuals: “What if we had never got rid of Boris, What if we had elected Rishi? What if we got rid of Liz?” And some wonder, as Truss herself did of the markets: “Surely she gets that?”

[Sugar Ape]

I know he's a bellend himself, but Cummings has been saying for ages that she is genuinely mental. Looks like he's right.

[Section_31]

3 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

I know he's a bellend himself, but Cummings has been saying for ages that she is genuinely mental. Looks like he's right.

And yet the Tory members voted for her. She never hid what she was, the memes and videos and Instagram pics have been doing the rounds for years and she told everyone at every hustings what her economic policy would be. And they voted for her in droves. 

[Megadrive Man]

Has anybody nicknamed her the thick Thatcher yet?

[Megadrive Man]

4 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

And yet the Tory members voted for her. She never hid what she was, the memes and videos and Instagram pics have been doing the rounds for years and she told everyone at every hustings what her economic policy would be. And they voted for her in droves. 

Most of these people worship Boris Johnson!

[Tj hooker]

Why hasn't that twat Kwarteng been arrested for insider trading yet

[Section_31]

The big ego/small brain combo permeates politics and journalism at that level. 

 

The likes of Kuensberg and Truss are peas in a pod. Too thick to know they're thick, only in it for the fame and to be the woman boss, but absolutely shit at it.

[Rico1304]

 

[Anubis]

37 minutes ago, MegadriveMan said:

Has anybody nicknamed her the thick Thatcher yet?

#ThickLizzie is the name of choice. There’s also a nice little adaptation of the Lizzie Borden rhyme doing the rounds.

[corro]

7 hours ago, Anubis said:

This is only going to end in violence.

I should fucking think so. 

[Josef Svejk]

46 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

And yet the Tory members voted for her. She never hid what she was, the memes and videos and Instagram pics have been doing the rounds for years and she told everyone at every hustings what her economic policy would be. And they voted for her in droves. 

They voted for her because the alternative wasn't white. That was the obvious outcome all along. 

[Harry Squatter]

It's possible that she will be a worse PM than Boris Johnson. I didn't think that was possible.

[Strontium]

43 minutes ago, MegadriveMan said:

Has anybody nicknamed her the thick Thatcher yet?

 

I went a little bit further back in July.

 

Truss has been imitating Thatcher for ages now, wasn't she posing on a tank a few months back? The problem of course is that she doesn't have an ounce of Thatcher's ability. Like a monkey that saw the Mona Lisa and tried to paint a copy with its own shit.

[Torvald Utne]

Fond of Trussolini myself

[Guest]

 

[Arniepie]

2 hours ago, Sugar Ape said:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kwasi-kwartengs-budget-day-cocktail-party-with-financiers-who-profited-from-crash-kwdbs72g0
 

Kwasi Kwarteng’s ‘budget day’ cocktail party with financiers who profited from crash

 

Kwasi Kwarteng attended a private champagne reception hours after delivering his mini-budget where hedge fund managers who would gain from a crash in the pound egged him on to commit to his plans.

 

The chancellor also gave guests insights about forthcoming government spending cuts during the event, which took place at the Chelsea home of Andrew Law, a financier and Conservative Party donor, on the evening of Friday, September 23.

 

The disclosure raises questions about Kwarteng’s political judgment. It will also raise concern that the event informed his decision to announce plans for even bigger tax cuts despite the market’s negative reaction to his initial plans. 
 

Kwarteng declared there was “more to come” in an interview on the Sunday after his mini-budget — a move that some No 10 officials blame for triggering a further fall in the pound on Monday morning.
 

Sterling collapsed to its lowest level since 1985 amid market turmoil which, alongside Kwarteng’s £45 billion tax giveaway for the highest earners, benefited many of those at the drinks event.
 

After the reception on Friday, at least two prominent hedge fund bosses told City associates that Kwarteng was “a useful idiot”. A senior Tory who advises business leaders said the phrase was in widespread circulation.

 

Law is worth about £750 million and has donated £3.6 million to the Tories since 2004. He has acknowledged taking short positions on the pound over recent years, meaning he has profited from the currency’s decline in value.

 

He invited about 30 people to his west London home for the drinks reception, including the stockbroker Howard Shore; the Swiss-born London banker Sir Henry Angest; Lord Leigh of Hurley, a corporate financier; Selva Pankaj, a merchant banker and investor; and Jake Berry, the Conservative Party chairman.

 

Others present included William Salomon, a senior partner at Hansa Capital, and Andrew Dawber, director of Civitas Investment Management. The event was also attended by representatives from the property, hospitality, healthcare and education sectors.

 

Guests drank wine, champagne and cocktails as they congratulated Kwarteng on the reforms he had outlined in the House of Commons.

 

According to a source, the ambience was “very, very positive”. Another said guests explicitly told Kwarteng to “double down” — an approach from which some stood to make enormous profits.

 

Two sources say Kwarteng described the Friday as a “great day for freedom”. A third said: “He was high on adrenaline. His big thing was: ‘Look, we’re not going to do stuff incrementally. We really believe in this stuff and that’s what we’re going to do.’ ”

 

Kwarteng is also said to have warned those present of austerity-style budget cuts to come. A source said: “He wanted to give an unadulterated message of ‘growth, growth, growth’, and that’s why he didn’t talk about savings, because otherwise the [news] agenda would have been all about savings — ‘where will you cut? What will you cut? Blah blah blah’ — they’re fully aware they have to make savings.”

 

The source added that Kwarteng appeared tired but pleased in a convivial atmosphere.

 

After the mini-budget, Treasury sources briefed national media organisations that Kwarteng had crossed the road and had a pint with officials, but they declined to volunteer details of the event he subsequently attended. As it was a party, officials would not be required to disclose it on ministerial transparency returns.

 

The chancellor went on to tell the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that he would slash more taxes, and confirmed he would neither bring forward his November budget nor ask the Office of Budget Responsibility to publish its forecasts of his plans.

 

His actions led the Bank of England to take action — at a cost of £65 billion — to calm the markets and prevent a meltdown in the UK pensions sector.

 

A source who attended the Law drinks party said Kwarteng seemed surprised by the reaction of the markets. “I think maybe he didn’t see it coming,” he said.

 

Allies of the chancellor have dismissed claims that his proximity to hedge fund managers has influenced his decision-making in office.

 

Last week, it was revealed that during the leadership contest he privately dined with Crispin Odey, a hedge fund investor and Kwarteng’s former boss, who has since said that bets against UK government bonds were the “gifts that keep on giving”.

 

Odey, a prominent Tory donor who also gave £870,000 to pro-Brexit campaign groups, founded the hedge fund Odey Asset Management, where Kwarteng worked before entering politics.

 

The latest revelations will heap more pressure on the chancellor, who was the co-author with Liz Truss of a financial package that has seen the Conservative Party fall to its lowest rating in the polls since the 1990s. No 10 insisted last week that he will not resign.

 

Tory officials confirmed that Kwarteng attended the gathering at Law’s home, which was arranged by the Conservative Party’s campaign headquarters, for an hour to talk through his mini-budget plans, giving a five-minute speech.

 

A source close to the chancellor said: “Any suggestion attendees had access to privileged information is total nonsense. The Growth Plan [published earlier that day] included a commitment to review our tax code to make it simpler, better for families and more pro-growth. The government’s ambitions on lowering the tax burden are hardly a state secret.”

We are being governed by criminals and imbeciles 

[Colonel Bumcunt]

Biden should remove the Tories.  

This is an authoritarian regime with no legitimate mandate.  

[Anubis]

Where the fuck are the security services in all of this? 
 

What’s needed here is police called to a hotel room at the Tory Conference, to find a coked up Liz Truss clutching a knife and covered in blood, and Kwasi’s lifeless body on the bed looking like he’s spent an evening at Freddie Kruger’s guest house.

 

Cone on MI:5. You’re supposed to protect the nation from threats, foreign and domestic.

[Anubis]

On a more serious note, does anyone expect these cross-party talks to stop her to bear fruit?