Sugar Ape

Liverpool’s Darwin Nunez: The knee injuries, the surgeries, the comebacks  It was an easy comment to overlook. Speaking to BT Sport after Liverpool’s 3-0 win against Ajax in the Champions League on Wednesday night, Jurgen Klopp praised Darwin Nunez’s performance at both ends of the pitch and recognised the “big heart” the Uruguayan showed during the 63 minutes he was on the pitch. Then came the sign-off: “Hopefully we took him off early enough.” Some might have dismissed it as a little joke — Klopp finding humour in the fact that Nunez was removed after 57 minutes in their 1-0 win over West Ham United a week ago but still missed Liverpool’s game against Nottingham Forest three days later. Others might have felt a little more heat emanating from the Liverpool manager’s words, given his recent comments about the club’s injury situation overall. However Klopp intended the comment, and whatever the guidance coming from Liverpool’s medical department, what lies beneath it is a 23-year-old who has already experienced the depths of despair due to serious injury. In recent weeks, it has been nothing more serious than a “tight hamstring” limiting Nunez’s minutes on the pitch, but to understand more about the approach that Liverpool are taking with their summer signing it’s worth going back six years, to a bobbly pitch in Uruguay. Nunez was just 17 years old when he ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) while playing for the under-23s of Uruguayan club Penarol in late 2016. He was having an excellent season and was on the verge of a call-up to the first team, but in a game against Sud America, on a pitch that was not in the best condition, he jumped for a header and landed awkwardly, causing his knee to bend badly. “There are two central ligaments in the knee: the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) and the ACL,” explains knee surgeon Andy Williams, who has worked in professional sport since 1999 and operated on approximately 4,500 ACLs (around half of which have been in professional sportspeople). “The ACL is key for athletes who need to change direction, as it allows control of rotation. Imagine the ligament is like a piece of rope with multiple fibres in it. When it ruptures, all those fibres break and it’s like a rope that has become two pieces of rope.” The injury is among the most feared for players, who know it means spending a lengthy period rehabilitating not only the knee but the entire musculature surrounding it. Even once they return to play, there is the worrying prospect of a re-rupture and starting the whole process all over again. We’ve seen the journey played out countless times among established professionals, though rarely do we hear of it happening to young players. However, it is not actually less common among young players, says Williams, who calls it “natural selection — anybody with a weakness gets found out”. “His might have just been bad luck, but of course, as they go from boy to man or girl to woman, they’re suddenly doing things they’re perhaps not quite yet physically capable of.” We hear fewer stories of young players suffering partly because they are less likely to be high profile but also, when they are less established before the injury, it’s even harder for them to find their way back. “For a serious young footballer, the big problem is they miss a season and never catch up with their colleagues,” says Williams. “When I operate on them, they all get back to playing just about, and everyone is happy with the surgery and with me, but they rarely get a contract. “So he (Nunez) is extraordinary to have got a contract having had an ACL so young. It’s a testament to his surgery and also to his talents.” The average return to play for a footballer who ruptures an ACL is around eight months, though it is usually longer if other structures within the knee have also been damaged. And for a younger player, Williams says research he published last year on 232 professional footballers whose ACLs he repaired shows that recovery can take longer. “We found the under-25s had a couple of months longer recovery. Maybe that’s because it’s a shock to them — there’s a big psychological element to it and they are frightened, while the older players have had more injuries so are more ‘get up and go’. “Or it might partly be because medical staff are worried about them because there is a much higher re-rupture rate, particularly in the under-20s. Re-rupture is a disaster. If you miss a second season at that age, that’s probably the end of your career. If you’re really senior, a club will wait for you — they’ve invested so much in you, everyone knows you’re good and proven. “If you’re a young kid who’s got talent, there are so many others that they’re not going to wait.” There is one potential plus-point for getting such a brutal injury so young, says performance consultant and Liverpool’s former head of physiotherapy Andy Renshaw: “It might have alerted him as a young player to how important it is for him to keep himself in good shape, listen to the support staff he has around him and focus on work in the gym work before games. “It might have pushed him into thinking, ‘I need to take care of myself and think about what I’m doing, what I’m eating, my sleep…’. “But it’s certainly not something you’d wish on any player, especially a young one, because he’s got another 15 or potentially 20 years of playing time ahead of him. During which, because he’s had that injury before, he’s at a greater risk of injuring it again and/or on his contralateral side.” Nunez’s route back from the injury was a difficult one. When he returned to training after the best part of a year out, he was still in pain and Penarol’s youth coaches couldn’t find a solution. In November 2017, the club’s first-team coach Leonardo Ramos called him up to the senior squad in a bid to get him back to fitness. “You could see he was an interesting player, but he wasn’t able to show all of his potential due to that knee injury,” Ramos tells The Athletic. “We spoke to him and started a process of strengthening his muscles and knee. He started to put on a bit more muscle mass, which helped his recovery. “But even when he was training with the rest of the squad, his knee hurt every time he went for the ball.” After months of playing through pain, often crying in training sessions according to Ramos, Nunez reached breaking point, telling Ramos he wanted to stop playing. It was then that the coach and the player’s agent decided to send him for a more detailed scan of his knee. It showed an exostosis — extra bone growth in his knee — which was the cause of his pain. In December 2017, Nunez had a second operation to remove the extra bone. It meant spending another six months rehabbing before his return in June, but when he returned, few were in any doubt as to the talent of the player who had been held back by injury and pain for 18 months. “From the moment they fixed it, his progress was impressive,” says Fabian Estoyanoff, who played alongside Nunez at Penarol. “He would beat his marker, beat anyone who came into his path. He was so fast and no one could stop him. He became the Darwin Nunez that everyone had been talking about before.” By the time Spanish second-division side Almeria came in for him in August 2019, Nunez had made 22 appearances for Penarol, scoring in two of them. A few months later, David Badia arrived as assistant coach at Almeria (alongside new manager Guti) and was quickly impressed by the young striker. “He had amazing speed and he could keep it for a long distance — for 25, 35 metres — which was amazing because it makes a difference with teams that play a high press to the centre-forward. He can find the space and with his amazing speed, he can make a big difference.” It wasn’t until he had been at the club for a few weeks that Badia even knew about Nunez’s injury history. “Because we arrived in November we didn’t have time to analyse player by player — what he has and what he has. We asked if anyone was injured and they told us, ‘No’. After two or three weeks, I saw his scar and I was really surprised that he’d had this kind of surgery. I was a player and I had the same surgery and it stopped me from playing football. “But he was better than the other players who hadn’t had this surgery. Usually, the players lose a little bit of speed. If he has this speed now, I cannot imagine how fast he was before the operation. So, in the end, we say, ‘OK, it’s not a problem’. Maybe if he has another operation he will be even faster!” Nunez finished his one season at Almeria as their top scorer (16 goals from 30 games) and missed just two games through injury. For Badia, that consistency is thanks to Nunez’s intense focus on ensuring he misses nothing in his preparation: “He’s taking care of his body amazing. He’s crazy — like Ronaldo. All day he’s looking after his body and taking care of his nutrition — everything.” It made Nunez stand out from some of his team-mates. While others would chat their way through sessions designed to strengthen their core or prevent injuries, the Uruguayan diligently got on with his work. It did not go unnoticed that while some players would do eight repetitions of an exercise instead of the required 10, Nunez never cut corners. Without fail, he would always complete the task asked of him. Is that because of his injury history? “Maybe,” says Badia, “because he feels what happens when you get this kind of problem, so he understood he should be careful about his nutrition, his rest, about all these important points. Sometimes the other young players who haven’t had these kinds of surgeries or problems, they don’t realise how important their nutrition or rest is.” Nunez’s performances at Almeria got him noticed and, in September 2020, he signed for Benfica for €24million (£20.3m, $24.6m). A COVID-19-interrupted first season saw him miss just three league games with injury (two of those for a hamstring concern and one classified as “unknown”), but in May 2021, the day after Benfica lost the final of the Portuguese Cup to Braga, Nunez was in hospital for another knee operation. This time, the surgery (done by arthroscopy, a type of keyhole surgery) was on his right knee, not the one that had suffered the ACL tear or subsequent problems. It was an operation scheduled for the end of the season in order to overcome a problem that had been dragging on for some time, and which had already led the coach, Jorge Jesus, to reveal that Nunez was physically limited. The original prognosis was that Nunez would be out for four months, but he returned after three and had a stormer of a season, scoring 26 times in 28 league games and impressing in the Champions League. Aside from missing two league games at the start of the season as he continued his recovery from surgery, he missed just one more league game in 2021-22 with a foot injury. While we don’t know for certain what the operation was that Nunez had in 2021, Renshaw says it’s possible that he had part of his meniscus removed — a meniscectomy. “It would be about that time frame. If it was a lateral one on the outside of his knee, it would take more towards 14 weeks, but with a medial one he could be rushed back in three months.” Renshaw, who spent eight years working at Liverpool before moving on in November 2017, says: “This young lad’s had surgeries on both his knees. He’s going to have to be managed, but it’s managed from an entire staff perspective. Obviously, there are elements of risk that we can’t mitigate, but we can do our best as a group of staff. “When any player like that goes into a club it’s not just going to be about physios and strength and conditioning staff, that player will spend the majority of his time on a football pitch and the amount of time he spends on the pitch, the amount of distance he covers at certain paces, that’s all going to have to be managed very carefully. There’s got to be buy-in from the football department with that as well as the medical and sports science department.” There was some concern from Liverpool fans in pre-season when Nunez was spotted wearing a strapping on his right knee, which is designed to help ease patellofemoral discomfort (this relates to the area around the patella or kneecap and femur). But thus far, there have been no signs of any knee issues. Even better news comes from surgeon Williams, who says the five and a half years that have passed since Nunez ruptured his ACL mean there is a significantly decreased risk of re-rupture. “Most re-ruptures occur in the first year. And definitely by two years,” explains Williams. “Basically, they get on the pitch and test it. If there’s something not quite right about it, they’ll find out, unfortunately.” He says that the “final result” of an ACL reconstruction is probably as long as two years from the time of surgery. “Often the player isn’t right for the first season back. But their sport is what fine-tunes them. So their final bit of physio is the playing.” Nunez’s ACL nightmare is long behind him now. And the tribulations it put him through have left him in a stronger place physically and mentally to deal with whatever the Premier League (and Champions League) has to throw at him. “For his past, his childhood and these kind of operations, if you are at the point he is, you are very strong,” says Badia. “This is not for someone who is soft in his mentality, ambitions or focus because in the end, if you lose a little bit, you are not at this point — it’s impossible.”

Is the tide going out on Boris Johnson’s comeback? | News | The Sunday Times (thetimes.co.uk) Is the tide going out on Boris Johnson’s comeback? The Bafta building on London’s Piccadilly is the spiritual centre of British drama. In the past week it was also the scene of intrigue which has come to a head this weekend in the most dramatic behind-closed-doors game of political chicken since Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made their deal at the Granita restaurant in 1994. It was at a party to celebrate the 200th anniversary of The Sunday Times at Bafta on Monday evening, over glasses of Taittinger champagne, that a member of Boris Johnson’s inner circle approached a prominent figure in Westminster and suggested the future of the country depended on “what Boris does next”. The Johnson ally then revealed that several members of his team were urging the former prime minister to endorse Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor whose resignation brought the Johnson premiership to a crashing halt, and end the civil war that has torn the Tories apart. “Several of us think that is the serious and sensible course of action,” the figure said. “If he thinks he can’t win, the statesmanlike thing to do would be to back Rishi and say the feud is over for the good of the country.” Half an hour later another of Johnson’s closest confidants proffered the same view: “Boris has to back Rishi. That’s the way to solve this.” Flash forward to today, when Johnson landed back in Britain after a holiday in the Dominican Republic. The two men were due to talk at 3.30pm, perhaps even to meet. But the conversation was delayed until 5.30pm and then further. They eventually talked after 9pm, though the outcome of their conversation was not immediately relayed by their camps. Johnson was holed up at Millbank Tower, just a few hundred metres from Parliament, where Sunak was based. The future of the country hangs on what happens next. Sunak appears to be in the box seats, with more than 120 MP supporters publicly declared, well over the threshold of 100 required to get on the ballot paper. His goal is to get to about 180, half the parliamentary party, giving him a huge moral advantage he did not have last time if the decision goes to the membership. Johnson’s aides said he had also cleared the 100 threshold but even this afternoon his supporters were phoning declared allies of both Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, the third candidate in the race, in an attempt to get them to switch. The goal for both men, if the meeting happens, is to turn up with the biggest club possible. One of those familiar with the calculations said: “Boris will want to say: ‘I’ve got the numbers, I’ll beat you with the membership, here’s a big job.’” During conversations between aides and intermediaries, a path was mapped out for Sunak to create a ladder, down which Johnson could climb. “The idea was that Rishi would show Boris some respect, bend the knee a little, apologise for bringing him down and find a way of working together.” Some speculated that Sunak might offer Johnson a return to the Foreign Office or an envoy role to Ukraine. But in the past 24 hours it is understood that several senior Tory donors, who have previously backed Johnson, are telling him the time is not right for a return. Sunak, meanwhile, is understood to be growing in confidence that he can land the support of key party right-wingers. The decision of Lord Frost, Johnson’s former Brexit negotiator, was a boost to this cause. In perhaps the most significant endorsement to date, Kemi Badenoch, who was fourth in the last leadership contest and is seen as a future leader, has announced that she too is backing Sunak. One senior Tory said that getting the two “big beasts” together was “like getting pandas to mate”. But sources in both camps said the goal was to avoid a wounding contest. After six years of chaos that may be optimistic but the opportunity for unity has arisen only because of the unprecedented turbulence of Liz Truss’s short time in office. “Don’t forget,” a minister said. “A lot of people believe that Boris only backed Liz because he thought she would implode and he could come back.” If so, it might have been one of Johnson’s most prescient political judgments. What made the showdown this weekend possible was the culmination of six years of political chaos in six days of tragedy and farce, culminating on Wednesday evening in one of the most chaotic votes the Commons has ever seen. The endgame began last Sunday at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat. That morning Truss told her team: “It’s quite serious.” Jake Berry, the party chairman, laid out plans to set up a “war room” in No 10 where key allies would fight to shore up support among MPs. Truss had already lost faith in Wendy Morton, the chief whip, openly referred to as “Wendy Moron” by No 10 staff. “The whips were giving everyone ‘Rag ratings’,” a source said, assigning “red, amber or green” status to MPs depending on their levels of hostility. “They were flagging people as amber if they were a just bit grumpy. Being annoyed about a piece of legislation is not the same as wanting to oust a sitting prime minister.” At this point “more than half the parliamentary party was red or amber”. A No 10 source said: “It was a shitshow. Some of the prime minister’s closest supporters were on amber. They had Oliver Dowden [Rishi Sunak’s closest friend in politics] as green!” If Truss did not yet accept her time in office was over, she knew last Sunday that her libertarian tax-cutting political project was dead. The message was delivered, in the politest tones, by Jeremy Hunt, her new chancellor, in a one-on-one meeting at Chequers, who laid out how much of her mini-budget he would have to junk. Hunt then explained the situation to the political team. “The mood of the team was that it was not tenable,” said one of those present. “The atmospherics were of shock. It was clear that Hunt held the whip hand. He was very matter of fact but it was clear he understood how powerful he was.” Together they agreed the choreography of Monday, where the chancellor would make a statement to camera in the morning to reassure the markets, then one to parliament in the afternoon. “We couldn’t wait or the markets might have been in freefall again,” a source said. That afternoon, Truss addressed the One Nation group of Tory MPs for 45 minutes. Having appointed Hunt, one of their number, she was well received. There was even time for levity when the former cabinet minister Matt Hancock spoke up. “Matt said there are a lot of talented people on the backbenches who she could give jobs to,” a witness said. This was greeted with hoots of laughter and a shout of, “Who did you have in mind, Matt?” But there were two pieces of grit in the oyster, which would come back to haunt Truss. Richard Graham raised concerns about Truss’s vocal support for fracking. Guy Opperman questioned why one of her aides had briefed against Sajid Javid, the former cabinet minister, describing him as “shit” in last weekend’s Sunday Times. The banging of desks from colleagues suggested anger was widespread. A meeting later, with the hardline Brexiteers of the European Research Group (ERG) went well, with MPs sympathetic that she had fought for their vision of a deregulated high-growth country. At 3.30pm on Tuesday, David Canzini walked into the war room in the pillared room, upstairs in No 10, and there was a spontaneous round of applause. The veteran Tory campaigner, who was a key figure in the final months of Johnson’s premiership, had been recruited by Berry and Mark Fullbrook, the No 10 chief of staff, to reinforce the war room. Canzini added focus because Berry and Fullbrook drifted in and out as other tasks dictated. Help was also on hand from loyalists like Brandon Lewis, the justice secretary, and a phalanx of advisers, including Giles Dilnot and Hudson Roe, special advisers to the foreign secretary James Cleverly. Dilnot was new to government but, as a former BBC reporter and communications chief to the children’s commissioner, one of the most experienced spin doctors in Whitehall. The sum of these meetings was that by Wednesday morning the war room and the whips had moved a decent number of MPs “from amber to green”. “Every day we were able to tell the prime minister that it had moved more in her direction,” said one of those involved. “She was always very positive. What brought her down was Wednesday’s shambles.” Truss would face a make or break prime minister’s questions against Sir Keir Starmer that day. To ensure it was a success, Berry went into battle with Hunt and the Treasury, who had wanted to save an announcement that the government was standing by the “triple lock” to uprate state pensions until the chancellor’s fiscal announcement on October 31. The party chairman had spent the night before with 25 MPs from the “Blue Barricade” group — MPs from red wall seats never held by the Conservatives — and every one of them said they would not vote to scrap the triple lock. Berry warned there was no way the legislation would get through parliament. “How come all these people who work at the Treasury don’t know how to count?” he asked. The announcement would give Truss something to trump whatever the Labour leader said at the despatch box. In the PMQ prep meeting Truss was warned that Javid was planning to use the first question of the session to name Jason Stein, one of Truss’s closest aides, as the source of the briefing against him. Ruth Porter, the deputy chief of staff, did a deal with Javid that Stein would be suspended and investigated. Stein was furious and was reinstated on Friday. Truss took a hammering from Starmer but was combative (quoting Peter Mandelson’s claim: “I am a fighter, not a quitter”) and the pressure from MPs appeared, momentarily, to subside. The wheels began to fall off when Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, alerted Truss that Suella Braverman, the home secretary, had committed two breaches of the ministerial code. She had emailed cabinet papers from her ministerial account to her private gmail account and then on to backbench veteran Sir John Hayes, a fellow right-winger. She also copied in someone she thought was Hayes’s wife but was actually an assistant to Andrew Percy, the MP for Brigg and Goole. After taking advice from colleagues, Percy spoke to the chief whip, Wendy Morton, who referred the issue to Case. Braverman was later to argue that the document was simply a written ministerial statement, that she had had a blazing row with Truss about immigration numbers (implying that was the real reason for her dismissal) and that she had sent it by mistake at 4am. It was, in fact, sent three or four hours later that morning. A No 10 source was withering: “She doesn’t make any decision without consulting John Hayes,” who had been acting as an unofficial adviser, frequently seen in the Home Office, meetings which had come to the attention of Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary. “Concerns had been raised prior to Wednesday that Braverman might have been sharing restricted government documents with people she shouldn’t have,” a source said. Braverman agreed to resign. To replace her, Truss called on Grant Shapps, the former transport secretary she unceremoniously sacked, who had spent the intervening six weeks leading the resistance against her. “There was some talk about whether we should do deals with terrorists,” said one involved in the talks, “but in the end it was decided it would be better to pick off a senior rebel”. If the chaos had ended there, Truss might have lived to fight another day. But her government was undone by a clever tactic from the Labour chief whip Sir Alan Campbell. The opposition tabled a motion opposing fracking but also added a clause that would have allowed them to seize control of the parliamentary timetable to pass their own legislation — a tactic used during Brexit battles in the Commons. Tory MPs were told they were on a three-line whip to vote down the plan and that the issue was a confidence motion, meaning they would be deselected if they disobeyed. However, several made clear they didn’t care about losing the whip and would not vote for fracking. Morton failed to give Downing Street a clear steer on whether they would win the vote, causing a loss of nerve. “She had no clue about the numbers,” said one source in the building. “Not a f***ing clue.” Half an hour before the vote, the deputy chief whip Craig Whittaker was overheard on the phone to one of Truss’s political aides. “Let me do my f***ing job. We are going to win. The majority will be approaching 100. Stop interfering.” But at the despatch box the climate minister Graham Stuart received a message from a junior No 10 official that it was no longer a confidence issue. After making a call to Truss, who told him not to make a point of order, he dropped the announcement into his winding up speech. Then all hell broke loose, with MPs in a frenzy about whether they could rebel or not. In the division lobby, there was chaos, with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thérèse Coffey, the deputy prime minister, trying to steer colleagues to back the government. Rees-Mogg was overheard threatening rebels with a “snap general election” if they failed to back the government. The chaos was capped with Morton, who felt undermined by the change, “in floods of tears” rushing through the voting lobby: “I am no longer chief whip.” Whittaker, furious that political defeat had been snatched from a Commons victory was heard saying: “I am f***ing furious and I don’t give a f*** any more.” The government won the vote with a majority of 96, but for nearly two hours no one knew if they had both resigned, a situation not fully resolved until 1.30am. Close allies think Truss made her mind up that night to quit. She cancelled a meeting with Hunt and after an apparently restless night was up at 5am on Thursday messaging aides. The 9am morning meeting that day in No 10 was one of the more surreal gatherings in recent political history. Truss was concerned she had lost every national newspaper with the exception of the Daily Express, whose readers liked the confirmation of the pensions triple lock. “That one front page cost us £5 billion,” said one senior Tory. “It would have been cheaper to just buy the newspaper.” Those present were incredulous that the “whip’s report” was just the fourth item on the agenda. “I was sitting there thinking: ‘There isn’t just an elephant but a f***ing T-rex in the room and no one is acknowledging it,’” said one aide. “It was completely mad.” Morton began her remarks by saying: “Can I just say my whips’ office is devastated by what happened.” The witness said: “It was as if none of it was anything to do with her.” The chief whip was then quizzed by Coffey, who pointed out she had moved some of the business on the parliamentary timetable. But when asked what it was, Morton replied: “I haven’t got that on me deputy prime minister,” an answer that reinforced the view of many in the room that she was clueless about her role. Morton then got up and announced that she had to be somewhere else. As she reached the door, she turned and said, in what is described as a “medium pace Yorkshire accent”: “Just remember. I. Am. The. Chief. Whip.” She left, leaving officials open-mouthed. Truss, furious at Morton, was now becoming reconciled to her fate. “It is difficult, isn’t it?” she told one confidant. The moment some staff knew it was over came late morning when they noticed Truss had changed her clothes. “She started the day in a red-ochre outfit and then I spotted she had changed into a dark blue suit,” one said — suitable attire for a political funeral. That was how she received Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, who was photographed slipping in by the rear entrance to Downing Street at 11.43am. Truss had summoned Brady but he told friends he was “reaching for his phone” to request a meeting with her when he was summoned. A cascade of MPs had contacted him overnight — some with formal letters of no confidence, others with WhatsApps and emails — saying Truss had to go. The prime minister asked: “Do you think the situation is retrievable?” Brady replied: “No,” and Truss concurred: “I don’t either.” At 1pm Truss told political aides and No 10 officials that she was going to resign. Close allies like Ranil Jayawardena, the environment secretary, and the trade minister Greg Hands had also assembled. “She was very together,” an ally said. Truss explained that her position was not tenable and said: “Politics is a blood sport,” a quote made famous by Labour’s Aneurin Bevan. Those standing close to the prime minister heard her, sotto voce, add: “And I’m the fox.” By then Truss had called her husband, Hugh O’Leary, asking him to leave work and come to No 10. He was the only one in the street supporting her when she addressed the nation at 1.35pm, where she repeated the same message. At the end of the day, Truss and a dozen aides had drinks in the Downing Street flat with her husband and two daughters. Some gazed at the Lulu Lytle decor installed by Carrie Johnson. Regular visitors to the flat know that there is no gold wallpaper at all. “It’s sort of red and looks like painted lacquer,” one Thursday night visitor said. The mood was downbeat. One close aide said: “I have to say this is an absolute tragedy. Liz Truss should have been a great PM. The sadness the staff feel is akin to a loved one dying. ‘Haunted’ is all I can really say to explain how I feel.” But this weekend, senior Tories and members of Truss’s team have assembled a circular firing squad, levelling brutal criticism at each other for the basic failures of her administration. Insiders pointed the finger of blame at Truss’s dysfunctional political operation, blaming Fullbrook and his deputy, Ruth Porter (who were themselves sometimes daggers drawn) of running a paranoid and ineffective operation that froze out the communications team under Adam Jones, who was absent over the past fortnight because he was getting married and on honeymoon. On Tuesday members of the war room team met officials for a grid meeting on the plans for future No 10 activity. As it concluded, one revealed: “We’ve never met before,” an astonishing state of affairs six weeks into a new government. Some Tory MPs have branded Fullbrook “Chief Wiggum”, the corpulent police chief in The Simpsons who is too lazy to fight crime. Political aides mocked the way he gave everyone a copy of “Total Competition: lessons in strategy from Formula One,” by the former team boss Ross Brawn as a substitute for “a proper political strategy”. Others pointed out that he had to confess on a WhatsApp chain at the recent Tory conference after the manager of the Hyatt hotel complained about aides abusing a VIP room service facility reserved for the prime minister. One adviser said: “Rome was burning and he was fiddling room service pretending to be the PM.” A party grandee said “a pumpkin on a stick would have done a better job”. In Fullbrook’s defence he had spells of absence because of a family death and an illness and allies say he was seldom listened to by Truss’s tight-knit team of young and often inexperienced aides. The question for the party is whether this circular firing squad now extends to the party as a whole. In an attempt to limit the number of candidates to replace Truss, the 1922 Committee agreed new rules on Thursday that only candidates with the backing of 100 MPs will be on the ballot paper when MPs vote on Monday. Some say that was put forward by some members of the 1922 executive in an attempt to thwart Johnson’s comeback ambitions. At least one member of the committee recommended the threshold be set at 150 nominations to end any hope of Johnson standing. The former prime minister made dozens of calls to MPs and cabinet ministers from his Caribbean beach holiday. One minister said: “He [Johnson] has been seeking to assure people that he would build a good team around him and unlike the last time would start off his tenure by bringing some grown-ups with him into Downing Street.” Karen Bradley, the former cabinet minister, who was keeping a private tally of the MPs supporting each candidate, had Johnson on 120 on Friday evening and Sunak on 140, with Mordaunt trailing on 75. She told allies that Johnson’s numbers had fallen over the past 24 hours — suggesting the momentum behind him had already reached its peak. Johnson’s momentum was further stalled yesterday when Charles Moore, a close friend from his Daily Telegraph days, wrote in that paper that it was too soon to come back. “I can see Boris storming back in different circumstances, with a Labour government in disarray and a lacklustre Tory opposition seeking renewal. I don’t see it working right now. True Boris fans will have the courage to tell him to sit this one out.” MPs are queasy about the privileges committee investigation into whether Johnson lied to the Commons over the Partygate scandal, which could see him suspended from the House, triggering a bid to oust him as an MP. Johnson’s allies were forced yesterday to say he would not try to scrap the investigation if he returned to Downing Street, after rivals claimed he was telling MPs he would do that. On Saturday a close ally of Mordaunt admitted she was unlikely to get the numbers to get on the ballot paper: “Honestly, I don’t see how she can win.” The leader of the Commons is now thought likely to play the role of kingmaker and is apparently leaning towards Sunak. On Friday, party insiders had blamed Andrea Leadsom, Mordaunt’s campaign manager, for advising her against becoming Sunak’s running mate. The former chancellor seems to be in pole position, but he knows that if the vote goes to the membership, he could still lose to Johnson. Aides, however, think he would see off the “big dog” amid warnings that some MPs would resign the whip if Johnson wins, a move that could hasten a general election. Another MP accused Sunak of being complacent and overconfident that he could see off Johnson without doing a deal with his rival. “His [Sunak] campaign is as arrogant as it was last time. They have already got Gavin Williamson to publicly back him and everyone knows that for most people that is a huge turn off.” Amidst this supreme psychodrama, which makes the bloodletting between the Miliband brothers look like a less than thrilling midweek episode of EastEnders, some senior Tories are still thinking about the good of the country and the economy. Whoever becomes prime minister, Treasury sources say the Halloween budget will go ahead, irrespective of who is chancellor. It is understood they want to ensure a “proper financial statement” takes place before the next meeting of the Bank of England monetary policy committee on November 3, when interest rates are predicted to rise. Hunt spoke to both Sunak and Mordaunt on Friday and is due to talk to Johnson on Monday. Mordaunt explicitly promised he would remain as chancellor if she won and the other two candidates are likely to keep him in post as well. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility has already received details of Hunt’s planned significant fiscal measures and will receive minor measures over the coming days. “The picture is grim,” a source said. “Whoever wins, tough decisions will need to be made.” The question remains whether they will be decisions made together or whether the budget creates new fissures in Tory ranks. Ben Wallace, the defence secretary who declined to run, is calling for unity, demanding that all three candidates work together. On Saturday he called Johnson and urged him to talk to both Sunak and Mordaunt. “I want to see a triumvirate,” he said. “For the sake of the country, all three of them have to come together and put aside their egos and recognise that without unity we will have a constitutional crisis and that the new leader will not be able to command a majority.” Wallace, who says he still “leans” towards his old friend Johnson, added: “Rishi has to jettison some of the people around him who have been engaged in the dark arts and destabilising the government, such as Gavin Williamson and Julian Smith. MPs do not want to see them rewarded. Boris has to answer all the questions of the privileges committee properly. Penny and the others have to make clear what their priorities are and where the £40 billion of cuts are going to fall.” Whatever the outcome, it will make a very good film. Perhaps the premier should be at Bafta.

Any big supermarket sells it. I usually buy a can when I have a chippy though, every chippy sells them by mine.

The best thing ever posted on this forum by Tom Ross about Akabusi looks like it’s been deleted. The whole thread is gone. It’s a fucking disgrace! Luckily, I’ve got it copied down or it might have been lost forever. You’re welcome. More of them are saved on this forum, thankfully. https://www.cockneylatic.co.uk/message-boards/topic/the-kris-akabusi-chronicles/

Just had a knock on the door then and some woman said “can I talk to you about why you should vote for your local Conservative candidate” and tried to give me a leaflet. Bad day to be trying that on people. Can’t believe they’ve got the gall to canvas today.

Few I’ve watched recently-ish. Heels. Drama about two brothers running their deceased fathers wrestling business in a small American town in the south. Fantastic show this, definitely worth a watch. Hoping season two will be out soon. 8.5/10. The Old Man. Thriller with Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow. Enjoyed this but don’t think it’s as good as some of the praise it gets. Bit slow in the present day scenes but I liked the flashbacks. 6.5/10. Under the Banner of Heaven. Based on the true story of a couple of brutal murders in the Mormon community. Good cast led by Andrew Garfield, really enjoyed this. 8/10. Black Bird. Probably the pick of the bunch of stuff I’ve watched recently. Superb cast; Taron Egerton, Greg Kinnear, Ray Liotta and the always excellent Paul Walter Hauser. Again, based on a true story, a drug dealer sentenced to ten years in prison is offered the change to have his sentence commuted if he agrees to go into a maximum security prison and can extract a confession from a suspected serial killer. 9/10. Dark Winds. Based on the Tony Hillerman books about the tribal police force on the Navajo reservation and set in the 70s this is a pretty good crime drama. Maybe fizzles out a little at the end but good enough to make me look forward to season two. 7/10. The Afterparty. Apple TV comedy/murder mystery show with Dave Franco starring as a music and film star who goes back to his high school reunion and invites a load of old classmates back for an afterparty at his place where he is promptly murdered (you find out he dies in the first five minutes so it’s not a spoiler) and each episode tells the events from the point of view of a different person at the party. Really liked this, a bit up its own arse at times (one character tells some of his flashback story by singing it, another has part of her story animated) but it doesn’t really detract from the show. 7.5/10.

These cunts aren't Tories in any sense of the word. Party has been hijacked by Tufton St nutjobs.

The rebels’ smartphone spreadsheet that means Liz Truss is still in deep trouble | News | The Sunday Times (thetimes.co.uk) The rebels’ smartphone spreadsheet that means Liz Truss is still in deep trouble The Samsung Galaxy Fold looks like any other smartphone rather than a concealed weapon, but news that Grant Shapps has purchased one (RRP: £1,649) ought to send a frisson of fear through Liz Truss’s inner circle. The former transport secretary, dismissed by the prime minister when she took power, was gleefully showing colleagues his new gadget at Conservative Party conference last week. The phone opens to create a double-sized screen on which Shapps can read his new spreadsheet, where he is recording the views of Tory MPs about Truss and her plans. The data is not encouraging for the PM. Shapps, who led a rebellion against Theresa May and then organised Boris Johnson’s leadership victory, had, by Tuesday evening, recorded 237 recent conversations with MPs on their doubts about Truss and her libertarian economic policies. His to-do list included 57 coffees with colleagues. Shapps’s spreadsheet already contained more than 6,000 historic “data points” from previous conversations with MPs. Last week’s gathering in Birmingham, where Truss was forced to perform a humiliating U-turn on her flagship plan to scrap the 45p top rate of tax, was the most disruptive Tory conference since 2003, when MPs plotted to oust Iain Duncan Smith as leader (he was gone two weeks later). MPs, ministers and former ministers exchanged views on how long Truss can survive and, as one Tory strategist put it: “Whether we are going to lose by what we would have lost by if we’d gone down in 1992 or whether it’s a 1997-style landslide.” The dossier of dissent taking shape on his spreadsheet explains why Shapps broke cover on Wednesday to warn that Truss “has ten days” to turn things around or MPs “might as well roll the dice and elect a new leader”. Behind the scenes, he is understood to have been in contact with both Johnson and Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, in a bid to gauge whether they are prepared to join an effort to oust Truss. According to fellow rebel MPs, Shapps is even offering himself as a caretaker prime minister, though few others regard him as realistic because he once used an alter ego – Michael Green – to sell get rich quick schemes on the internet. One rebel observer noted, wryly: “That rules out Grant but I’m not sure his get rich schemes were any more dubious than the chancellor’s.” If Shapps is causing concern, Michael Gove is causing fury in No 10. He went public last week with his opposition to the 45p tax cut, branding it a “display of the wrong values”. Downing Street sources say Gove’s troublemaking came after Truss privately contacted the former levelling up secretary to seek his advice and offer him a job. They met for tea in the state room at No 10 on September 26, the Monday before conference. Gove told Truss “how much he admired her” and praised the energy price support package, though he made clear that he did not support the abolition of the top rate of tax. Truss, in turn, asked Gove if he was interested in a new role. Nothing was explicitly offered but the PM alluded to a senior diplomatic role working with a major ally. Possibilities could have been Israel or the United Arab Emirates where ambassadorial vacancies are soon due to arise. In Downing Street’s view, Gove went to Birmingham and “stabbed the PM in the back”. A senior Conservative said: “Michael Gove is trying to destroy another Tory leader.” In an astonishing attack on Gove’s character, a friend of Truss added: “Michael is troubled and has never found his place in the sun. There is something deeply troubling about the darkness inside him. It grips him and it takes over. “It corrupts his soul. The more he plots, the more baggage he collects and the more conflicted he then becomes about who and what he is. His answer to everything is more tax, more salami slicing, more failed economics. The Tory party has rejected him.” A Gove ally denied that he had gone behind Truss’s back. “Michael had told his whip and Liz directly that this is what he was going to do,” the source said, also accusing Downing Street of briefing an “inaccurate account” of the conversation. But accounts have reached the whips that Gove was privately suggesting the biggest names should “get the old gang back together”. One MP said: “Michael thinks Boris and Rishi should come together and get the show back on the road.” It is unclear how this might work, given that Sunak resigned from Johnson’s government and Johnson sacked Gove as an act of revenge for his betrayal in 2016. Sunak returned to London on Thursday having spent time with former aides at his constituency home in Yorkshire. His allies are torn about whether he can stage a comeback. Johnson, meanwhile, has kept his head down, though rumours persist that he has compromising information about Truss’s time as a member of his government that his allies could deploy to hasten her departure. One idea floated to the former PM is he could establish a new power base by leaving his Uxbridge constituency and replacing Nadine Dorries as MP for Mid Bedfordshire, who is due to get a peerage in Johnson’s resignation honours list. Some say Johnson thinks it is too soon to return and he needs to make more money before another tilt at the top. But a former adviser said there was no chance of him staying in west London where Johnson is defending a majority of just 7,210. “He won’t want to lose, it’s no good for the brand. His options are take the chicken run [to another seat], or just run. He can leave and make money and would have no trouble getting a seat if he wants to come back later.” If all this plotting seems like pie in the sky, it is nonetheless remarkable that it is going on at all. A former minister suggested Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, who finished second and third in the leadership contest, should visit Truss to tell her the game is up. A former Downing Street aide revealed: “Penny is full on manoeuvres. She told someone directly that she was restarting her campaign.” Another MP added: “The options are death if we stick with Liz or ridicule if we get someone else and right now ridicule seems preferable.” Worryingly for Truss, negative views about Truss’s medium-term prospects extend to the upper reaches of the cabinet. Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, told a prominent Tory on Monday night, in the hearing of another Conservative, that Truss’s chances of survival are “only 40-60”. It is understood that he shared the same assessment with Shapps last week. The chancellor denies the remarks. All the leadership plotting marred Truss’s attempt to reset her premiership with the U-turn on the 45p rate. She and her closest aides decided to act about 9pm last Sunday after Truss spoke to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee. A source said: “Graham told her: ‘You will get the 45p cut through. Just. But it’s probably the last vote you’ll win.’” Truss summoned Kwarteng to her room in the Hyatt. The chancellor had spoken to about 25 MPs and had independently concluded that the 45p cut would have to go. The final decision was taken about 10pm. Most MPs were relieved that Truss had cauterised an open political wound. Truss then used her platform speech on Wednesday to defend her plans to cut taxes and deregulate and attack “the enemies of growth”. “The conference speech is the start of the fightback,” a senior aide said. “It reinforced that Liz does have a clear plan and who the real enemy is.” On returning to Downing Street on Wednesday afternoon, Truss told aides: “Come on, it’s straight back to work. We’ve got to hammer Labour and show our MPs and the public that we’ve got a credible plan that will make lives better and win the next election.” Truss, Kwarteng and her ministers will this week begin a rollout of supply-side reforms in a bid to show that they can kick-start growth, beginning with reforms to financial services and continuing with strikes legislation. But there is concern among MPs that by failing to announce any of this in Truss’s speech, the only major policy announcement of the entire conference was the U-turn. A former No 10 aide said: “All she has done is bake it in as a historic error on 45p in the public mind, like Gordon Brown dithering over the election or Theresa May saying ‘Nothing has changed’. It was the least professional conference I have ever been to.” Disquiet also extends to party donors, who attended a “funereal” drinks do on Tuesday evening. Malik Karim, the party treasurer, made a speech about how difficult things were and introduced the prime minister. “There was complete silence,” one of those present reported. “No applause at all. The mood of the donors was like Bernie Madoff’s investors,” a reference to the US Ponzi scheme boss who stole millions and ended up dead in jail. On Friday, Kwarteng received the first assessments of his plan from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent watchdog on the public finances, which will be published next month. The problem for the chancellor is that the Treasury calculates that reversing the rise in national insurance and halting a planned rise in corporation tax will only boost growth by between 0.4 and 0.9 percentage points after five years — meaning he needs huge supply side reforms to hit his target of 2.5 per cent growth. More existentially, even the chancellor has privately expressed the view that the public does not really know “what growth is,” making it an uphill climb to base the entire future of the government on achieving it. A No 10 source agreed: “We’re now effectively running a huge public persuasion campaign about why people should care about economic growth and why it’s the silver bullet to making their lives better.” In a further bid to placate the markets, Kwarteng will publish a new fiscal rule to reduce debt as a proportion of GDP over a five-year period, rather than the present three-year period, and ensure public spending rises slower than growth. “The problem is that to satisfy the Office for Budget Responsibility they will need to do massive cuts,” a Tory adviser said, “but the cuts they will have to do they can’t get through. Then the markets will shit themselves again.” The cabinet is already in open revolt. Suella Braverman, the home secretary, opposed the 45p U-turn, accusing the rebels of mounting “a coup”. But she also condemned Truss’s plans to liberalise immigration rules to boost growth. The first big battle will be over benefits. Truss is set on uprating them by wages rather than prices to save money. But Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, broke cover to demand that they rise in line with inflation. Other cabinet ministers, even including Jacob Rees-Mogg, agree. Conference also led to a showdown between Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, and No 10. He was forced to dig in after “to-ing and fro-ing” over how much spending he was allowed to announce in his conference speech. Some claim Thérèse Coffey, the deputy prime minister, was trying to meddle with his speech. One cabinet colleague even claimed Wallace threatened to resign, something he denies. But an ally made clear it would be a “resigning point” if Truss “backtracks” on her leadership campaign pledge to lift defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030. One of the primary complaints against Truss is that she has needlessly created enemies. Shapps’s spreadsheet details how the PM has already lost the support of the so-called G- Group of about 20 right-wing conservatives. One of the most prominent was Peter Bone, who was made deputy leader of the Commons by Johnson, voted for Truss, joined her transition team and was then sacked. “She just abolished his post,” a senior MP said. “She has taken somebody who was loyal to her and crossed the road to make an enemy. Not one of the people in the group now support her.” Worse still, as far as most MPs are concerned, is Truss’s decision to sack Isaac Levido, the mastermind of the 2019 election landslide, from running the next election campaign. In a questionable move Conservative Campaign Headquarters will now give the £5 million contract to the company of Mark Fullbrook, the No 10 chief of staff, whose firm is run by Alice Robinson, the wife of the Tory party chairman Jake Berry. One irate Tory said: “Replacing Isaac with Mark two years before a general election is like replacing Pep Guardiola with Mr Bean on the eve of the Champions League final.” The Tories are now trailing Labour by 30 points. The concern of many moderates is that Truss is pursuing an ideological crusade which is not backed by the public. At a fringe meeting on Tuesday James Johnson, Theresa May’s No 10 pollster, was asked by a councillor about the party’s prospects at the local elections next year. “Do you think things will have got better by then?” the councillor asked. Johnson replied: “I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you’re going to be a blood sacrifice on the altar of the plan.” Truss’s team insist that she will deal with rebellions and plots with total ruthlessness, sacking, removing the whip and banning rebels from standing at the next election. The problem is that Truss’s chief whip, Wendy Morton, is seen as weak and ineffectual and is branded “Wendy Moron” by MPs and advisers, she “could not fight her way out of a wet paper bag” according to one senior Conservative. Truss seems aware that she needs to do more to placate her party. She told aides last week: “Our plan is the right one but we need to win hearts and minds.” The PM is on Sunday expected to appoint a minister of state role at the trade department and is expected to to use it to reward a Sunak backer who “hasn’t joined Gove’s coalition”. A Downing Street source said. “We need to hug MPs closer and explain what we’re doing better.” Truss will hold a policy lunch with MPs on Tuesday to talk about infrastructure. If the home front is a minefield, there are some grounds to be optimistic about Britain’s role in the world. When Truss visited Prague last week for a conference of European nations, she repaired relations with Emmanuel Macron, the French president and discussed energy security. On the plane Truss told aides: “We’ve got to work closely with Europe on energy. This is a rich world problem, not just a Britain problem.” Better relations with France could bear fruit quickly. Braveman is hoping to strike a deal to double the number of French police combating the flow of migrants across the Channel. Diplomats in London, Brussels and Dublin are also cautiously optimistic that there could be a new deal over the Northern Ireland protocol by October 28. That would see the EU approve red and green lanes for goods passing from Great Britain into Northern Ireland, allowing them to reduce the number of border checks, in exchange for the UK dropping its opposition for the European Court of Justice to play a role in the agreement. In Downing Street, the hope is that Truss can survive and buy time. They are backed up by Brady, who is letting it be known that he would not be inclined to allow a party rule change to permit a vote of no confidence in Truss unless the numbers were overwhelming. That means the rebels would need 178 supporters to threaten her yet. But the sharks are circling. Even allies are unimpressed by the functioning of Downing Street so far. A serving minister said: “They’re f***wits. They think they’ve turned it around. But they don’t understand politics.” Another data point for the spreadsheet.

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

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?”

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.”

https://www.ft.com/content/d5f1d564-8c08-4711-b11d-9c6c7759f2b8 The Tories have become unmoored from the British people In a single week, Britain has gone from being one among many nations facing fierce economic headwinds to being a financial basket case, its currency plunging, bond yields and mortgage rates rising and pension funds scrambling to stay afloat. One question has repeatedly popped up: why did the mini-Budget trigger such chaos, given that most of it had already been trailed and that the cost of the unexpected 1p cut to the basic rate of income tax and elimination of the top rate pales in comparison to the energy price guarantee. This misses two key things. First, the government’s hand was forced on energy bills. Their policy will save livelihoods and perhaps even lives. It’s not cheap, but it’s perfectly rational. Last Friday’s tax cuts, by comparison, were an unforced fiscal error. The number may be smaller, but it signals a departure from sensible economic thinking. And that brings us to the second problem: the scale of this departure. A week into “Trussonomics”, one could make the case that this represents the first time in modern history that the government of a major developed country has decided to completely unmoor itself from not only economic orthodoxy but its own electorate. Every few years, hundreds of political scientistsevaluate political parties on various issues, from the environment to law and order, gender issues to the redistribution of wealth. As part of this they place these parties along the left-right scale of economics, with the far left indicating full-blown communism and the far right the most extreme low regulation, low tax, free-market approach. Until last week, the Conservative party looked like a relatively normal centre-right party on economics, scoring a 7 on the scale from 0 (far left) to 10 (far right). This placed it equidistant between Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party in France and the more hardline US Republicans. Last Friday, that all changed. In a snap FT survey of a group of British political scientists across the political spectrum, the consensus was that under Prime Minister Liz Truss and chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, the Tories now score a stunning 9.4. This puts them well beyond where the Republicans stood under Donald Trump, and just to the right of the Brazilian Social Liberal party that took Jair Bolsonaro to power in 2018. Out of 275 parties in 61 countries, the Tories under Trussonomics rank as the most rightwing of all. It should not then be surprising that such a voluntary swerve to the right spooked the markets far more than other costlier but sensible policies. Between the Bank of England’s interventions and the possibility of some moderation before the Kwarteng’s November statement, the economic crisis may abate somewhat. But the damage to the UK’s reputation, and that of the Conservative party, may already be done. On the same economic scale where Truss’s government now scores a 9.4, the average UK voter positions themselves at 3.1 and the average Conservative at 4.2. The Tories have plotted a course to the very edge of the economic map, and when they scan the horizon there is nobody to be seen.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/simon-clarke-interview-truss-is-enjoying-her-chance-to-pull-britain-out-of-its-fools-paradise-rndrm9kn6 It has been, Simon Clarke admits with a little understatement, an “uncomfortable week” for the government. As part of the “quad” of Liz Truss’s closest political allies, Clarke has had a ringside seat for both the formulation of Kwasi Kwarteng’s ill-fated “pro-growth” budget and the crisis talks to deal with the fallout. But as he talks, under a portrait of the Queen and next to the obligatory ministerial Union Jack in his Westminster office, the new secretary of state for levelling up is unrepentant. Alongside his boss in Downing Street who, he says, is “astonishingly resilient”, Clarke, 38, is convinced the market turmoil will pass. And more importantly that the new government is doing fundamentally the right thing — no matter what the public might think of it now. “If I was to describe one word for Liz at the moment, it is purposeful,” he says. “She knew — and this was certainly something we discussed during the summer — that this would not be a comfortable process. “[She knew] particularly early on, there would be real potential unpopularity to be courted in seeking to say things and do things which weren’t going to be easy or quick wins. Frankly, she is doing what she believes is right. And I think she’s enjoying having the chance to do that. She’s obviously, you know, carrying pressures, which most of us would find pretty crushing. But she’s clear in her own mind and her conscience is clear that this is the right thing to do.” Kwarteng’s £45 billion of tax cuts led to a savage response from the markets and voters. The pound fell to a record low, while the Bank of England had to make an emergency £65 billion intervention to shore up pension funds. Truss, a relative unknown to many voters a week ago, is hugely unpopular. In the space of four days Labour has gone from a 17-point lead over the Tories, the biggest since 2001, to a 33-point lead, the biggest in any poll since the late 1990s. Truss and her top team, however, appear determined to push ahead, their political and ideological vision apparently undimmed. Did they envisage this week’s market carnage when they were drawing up the budget? Clarke suggests they did. “It’s fair to say that how the market is going to respond is always hard to forecast but yeah, we understood and I think we accept it now,” he says. The government, he argues, must channel Margaret Thatcher and stay the course. “This is a fundamental departure from where we’ve been,” he says. “In some ways there is an analogy with the 1980s and what the Thatcher government was seeking to do in terms of a reset moment where you fundamentally revisit how not just the previous government but multiple governments have addressed the fundamentals of the economy. “Our job is to show the same rigour and frankly resilience in the face of the inevitable buffeting that is now going on. To close that gap between the vision and people’s wider understanding of what we’re seeking to do here.” The budget was “contentious”, as Clarke puts it, but “you have to embrace the fact that there are some things where it’s good to have a contentious policy”. He adds: “There is absolutely no question on the supply side reform issues that we have ducked a lot of stuff like childcare, like how you boost home ownership, for far too long. We have accepted the gimmickry that the 45p rate is a net tax raiser. These are battles that are worth having. “It is undoubtedly the case that this country has not been in a good place for a long time on a lot of these economic fundamentals. We have acquired spending habits that outstrip our ability to pay for it. That needs to change.” The markets, he suggests, overreacted, pointing to the fact that the government telegraphed two of the biggest tax cuts — reversing the rise in national insurance and freezing corporation tax — in advance. “It’s not for me to criticise the markets, the market has its own wisdom. We should respect that,” he says. “But I do think it’s worth reaffirming that what we have done is cancelled some tax rises which were in anticipation rather than already in effect. And we’ve restored the top rate of tax which applied until, I think, the 2009 budget.” The government is now facing a battle to restore fiscal credibility. Clarke says that there will have to be significant cuts in public spending, arguing that for too long the West has lived in a “fool’s paradise”. He says: “My big concern in politics is that western Europe is just living in a fool’s paradise whereby we can be ever less productive relative to our peers, and yet still enjoy a very large welfare state and persist in thinking that the two are somehow compatible over the medium to long term. “They’re not. We need to address that precisely because in the end, if we want those strong public services then we are going to have to pay for them. I think it is important that we look at a state which is extremely large, and look at how we can make sure that it is in full alignment with a lower tax economy.” Put simply, Clarke is making the case that tax cuts need to be matched by significant cuts in public spending, particularly the welfare budget. While the scale of these is not yet clear, the Resolution Foundation has suggested they may need to be as much as £35 billion. With the NHS and defence spending effectively protected, that means significant cuts elsewhere, particularly for welfare. As recently as June, when he was still in the Treasury, Clarke defended Sunak’s decision not to cut taxes. The levelling up secretary says that he remains committed to “spending discipline”. “I do think it’s very hard to cut taxes if you don’t have the commensurate profile of spending and the supply side reform. If we’re adopting this plan, which I think is exciting and fundamentally addresses the competitiveness issue, the rest of the piece needs to move in tandem. “We are privileged to deal with very large budgets. My experience as CST [chief secretary to the Treasury] is that there is always something you can do to trim the fat.” Johnson’s premiership included big commitments on capital spending, including £4.2 billion for 40 hospitals, £11.5 billion for affordable homes, alongside new roads, railways and £2 billion of investment in cycling and walking. Some of this, Clarke says, will have to give. “One of the things which the PM has been really clear about is the need for a real prioritisation of those things that matter the most,” he says. “So logically, other things either have to be cancelled, or move to the right in terms of when they’re delivered. To govern is to choose.” What would Clarke say to constituents facing huge rises in their mortgage rates? “Clearly interest rates are a matter for the Bank,” he says. “They are striking the difficult balance between the discipline the markets require and what the economy needs in order to grow. It’s vital that we ease that pressure on rates by living within our means.” He does not think that the housing markets will collapse, and is optimistic that the economy will begin to turn early next year when he thinks mortgage rates will begin to fall. “The worst of the situation is already behind us in terms of that heightened anxiety in recent days,” he says. “Do I believe that we will see things improve very markedly as we move into 2023? Yes I do. “I don’t think that there’s anything here which can’t fundamentally be addressed by setting out a strategy that the markets have confidence in.” The government believes that its broader reforms, cutting regulations, simplifying the planning process and relaxing immigration restrictions, will be fundamental. Planning reforms, one of the thorniest issues for the Conservatives over the past 12 years, lie within Clarke’s brief. Truss has scrapped housing targets and will be keen to avoid the mass revolts over the issue — followed by inevitable U-turns — her predecessors had. For Clarke, incentives are the key. “In removing those targets, can we in any way back away from the fact that we need to build homes? No we can’t.” He says Tory MPs who were at the forefront of opposing planning reforms “rightly emphasise the imperative of building on brownfield rather than greenfield sites”. “We are working on a package of measures to try and go with the grain of people’s instincts on this. For too long housing policy is something that Whitehall has sought to do to communities rather than with.” Britain has failed to build the homes it needs since the time of Harold Macmillan, the Tory prime minister five decades ago, Clarke says. “The fact the green belt is larger today than it was when Margaret Thatcher came to power is an extraordinary state of affairs,” he says. “This country has got issues with housebuilding. But we also need to protect the spaces that people love and to avoid a sense that the government is threatening the very things that make communities nice places in which to live.” He said the planning system should most fundamentally be about popular consent and should create incentives for residents to support development. “What I would like is to have a system . . . whereby if you’re a resident of X community there is something in it for you about a new settlement in your area.” And in these new straitened fiscal times what about levelling up, both his ministerial brief and a cause he has long championed as an MP for Middlesborough? Clarke insists that Truss remains as committed to levelling up as Boris Johnson. “It’s absolutely fundamental to why the PM’s in politics. There is a total commitment as we aim to boost growth, that we do so in a way which actually spreads that growth more evenly across the United Kingdom.” But as the past few days have shown, Truss’s plans to drive that growth is fraught with both political and economical peril. While Clarke, an early supporter of the prime minister, is a true believer there are plenty of his colleagues who aren’t. If he and Truss are right, there are still going to be plenty more “uncomfortable” weeks ahead. If they’re wrong, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.

You may be right, but I think they’ll struggle to get it through. I mean, good chance she doesn’t even make it that far without being forced to either fuck Kwarteng off to save her own skin or reverse some of her reforms due to pressure, but if she does then she’ll have big problems passing all this. I can see something like One nation Tory types will revolt and block the 45pc tax cut and then a load of the right wing headbangers will reply in kind and block things that piss them off and a lot of them are evangelical about not increasing immigration numbers no matter how valid the need may be. Truss doesn’t have a lot of backing amongst her MPs really. She only got 50 votes in the first round. She didn’t try and offer an olive branch to her MPs who didn’t support her and fucked them all off to the backbenches. Patel will be strongly opposed to increasing immigration and probably has followers she can call upon and her own Home Secretary is even worse than Patel, which I didn’t think was possible. Loads of these Libertarian nut jobs are backing her because they think she’s bringing in the tax cuts they wank over and other things they want like Fracking. If they start to get blocked then they’ll lose their shit. The Daily Mail will have headlines calling Tory MPs traitors.