Liz Truss has called off a planned visit and media clip amid continued chaos, shortly after she pledged to maintain the so-called triple lock guarantee on pension increases. Downing Street and the Treasury had for days refused to commit to the triple lock, under which the state pension would rise by whichever is the greatest of inflation, average earnings or 2.5%, amid a review of spending by...
Liz Truss has performed a humiliating U-turn over her flagship plan to cut corporation tax, as she insisted she would hang on as prime minister despite being forced to sack her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, over the government’s disastrous mini-budget. At a hastily called and notably brief Downing Street press conference, soon after she replaced Kwarteng with Jeremy Hunt, a notably subdued Truss...
Jeremy Hunt has been appointed as Liz Truss’s new chancellor, in a stunning reversal of political fortune and a sign that the beleaguered prime minister wants to reach out to other sections of the Conservative party. Hunt, the former foreign secretary and health secretary, who has twice tried unsuccessfully to become Conservative leader, was named chancellor after Kwasi Kwarteng, in the job for...
The decision to pay Liz Truss’s new chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, through a private company has been dropped after criticism from within the Conservatives as well as from opposition parties. The government admitted over the weekend that Fullbrook would be paid through his lobbying firm, a move that could have helped him avoid paying tax. He had previously claimed the firm had stopped all...
The British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, will meet her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, on Thursday with her plan to have put the UK’s “toughest sanctions regime against Russia” on the statute book in time for the trip having fallen through. Truss told MPs the laws would be in place by 10 February, but nothing has been put to parliament, raising suspicions among opposition MPs that government...
The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, is playing with fire. On Wednesday night she described Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a “rogue operator” lacking rationality, and with “no interest in international norms”. As a result, she said: “We will keep going further and faster to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine.” She is clearly revelling in her imagined proxy war on the Russian bear and no one in...