Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor of the exchequer for 43 of Liz Trussâs 49 days as British prime minister, has said Truss âessentiallyâ sacked him âon Twitterâ, a dismissal he called âkind of Trumpianâ in its swiftness and brutality as Britain fell into crisis.
Kwarteng said: âOne of the things that I feel bad about, among other things, was that she capitulated very quickly [to pressure to sack him]. So I came back and I was sacked, essentially on Twitter. So, kind of Trumpian.â
Kwarteng and Truss were close political allies and friends who entered parliament together in 2010, rose as ministers under successive Conservative prime ministers then took power after Boris Johnson was forced out.
Truss became prime minister on 6 September 2022. She installed Kwarteng at the Treasury, only to fire him little more than a month later, on 14 October, amid a financial crisis stoked by the âmini-budgetâ the two introduced.
Truss did not issue a tweet announcing Kwartengâs firing before telling him â as Trump famously did to subordinates while US president â but Kwarteng nonetheless learned of his dismissal from a journalistâs post.
Kwarteng described events to One Decision, a podcast co-hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and the reporter Julia Macfarlane.
It happened as Kwarteng rushed back to the UK from an International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington.
âI was due back on the Saturday morning,â he said, âand I came back on the Friday morning and I was driven to Downing Street and I was essentially sacked.
âBut on the way to Downing Street, I could see on Twitter, I think it was Steve Swinford of the [London] Times had said ⦠âThe chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, sackedâ [or] âwas sackedâ or âhas been sackedâ, I donât know what tense it was. But the message was clear.â
Kwartengâs subsequent meeting with Truss was âdefinitiveâ, he said, with no sense the prime minister might change her mind. Their friendship is widely reported not to have survived.
Kwarteng said he was âsurprised because it was obvious to me that once Iâd been sacked, it was over for her. So I was sort of slightly incredulous. I was thinking to myself: âYou have just destroyed your premiership. Thereâs no coming back.ââ
Kwarteng said: âI think I said to her or maybe a [special adviser] afterwards, that she had about three weeks ⦠and of course I was wrong. It was six days.â
Truss resigned on 20 October.
In his One Decision interview, Kwarteng repeated admissions of mistakes made with Truss, mostly regarding the speed at which they attempted to introduce their economic plans, which centred on tax cuts and spending increases, thereby panicking the markets.
He insisted, however, that he and Truss were right to say the British economy was in need of stringent measures.
Truss has made similar statements, including in a widely panned new book, Ten Years To Save the West, in which she revealed how Queen Elizabeth II advised her to âpace yourselfâ, advice given two days before the monarch died.
Kwarteng said Truss had âadmitted that was the right advice. But of course, hindsight is a beautiful thing. And we pushed ahead, and we all made mistakes, and weâve got to be honest about thatâ.
Kwartengâs description of his firing as âTrumpianâ may cause comment, given Trussâs high-profile attempt to carve out a profile on the far right of US politics, amid Trumpâs third presidential campaign.
Kwarteng will leave parliament at the next election, which must happen this year. The Sunak government is struggling in the polls, widely expected to lose power to Labour. But Kwarteng had a warning for the prime minister about a threat from his right.
Saying he would not have removed the whip from Lee Anderson, the former Conservative party vice-chair who made allegedly Islamophobic comments about the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, Kwarteng said Andersonâs new party, the hard-right Reform UK, presented a threat to Sunak.
âI think theyâre a big problem,â Kwarteng said, though he said he did not think Reform would win seats at Westminster, given Britainâs lack of proportional representation.
Kwarteng said: âAll over the western world, youâve got centre-right parties that are quite vulnerable to more rightwing parties ⦠on questions of identity, on immigration and also other social issues.
âWe [the Conservatives] were in the kind of low 20s when I left office, and when Liz Trust left office, and weâre in the low 20s today. And the reason why we donât seem to have made any progress in those 18 months, I think, can be explained very considerably by this phenomenon, this Reform party.â