On February 4, 2023, Liz Truss wrote an exclusive 4,000 word article for The Telegraph: ‘I assumed upon entering Downing Street my mandate would be respected. How wrong I was’.

The date matters as it had been around 100 days since she left office as Prime Minister.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

(Please open all links in a new tab for the time being, as I am still awaiting a response from WordPress on this loss of functionality when all links opened that way automatically.)

She reflected on where she was at this point in 2022. February 24, the date of this post, is the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine conflict:

One year ago this week, I went to Moscow as foreign secretary to warn my Russian counterpart of the grave consequences that would result from any invasion of Ukraine. Had anyone told me then that, 12 months later, I would be a backbench MP following a 49-day term as prime minister, I would not have believed it.

Since my departure from Downing Street just over 100 days ago, I’ve spent many hours reflecting on what happened during my time there, what went wrong and what I might have done differently. This soul-searching has not been easy.

Now I want to set out, from my perspective, what happened and what I have learned.

Urgency

When Boris stood down as Conservative Party leader on July 7, Truss was in Bali at a G20 meeting of foreign ministers:

I watched his speech live in my hotel room. It struck me as crazy to be deposing a leader who had secured an 80-seat Commons majority for the Conservative Party less than three years ago.

I had always assumed that Boris would fight the next general election in 2024. Standing for the leadership myself was a faraway prospect and, as a result, I didn’t have any kind of infrastructure in place for the contest on which the starting gun had just been fired.

All I had in that hotel room, nearly 8,000 miles from Westminster, was a series of messages urging me to return to London – including one from a fellow foreign minister that simply read: “Get back home woman and start hustling.”

That’s what I felt compelled to do.

She thought that boldness was the way forward:

I feared the consequences of high energy prices, high taxes and a slowing global economy without bold action. What we really needed was a change in policy direction and mindset in order to kick-start a return to sustainable Economic growth.

As it was, the Government’s economic policy platform included raising National Insurance (imposing the so-called Health and Social Care Levy) and increasing corporation tax to the same level as France – positions which I had vigorously challenged around the Cabinet table. Meanwhile, I sensed increasing resistance within the Government to the essential proposals to diverge from EU rules.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, under Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt? No wonder she had to go.

She felt a sense of urgency:

As I started piecing together my nascent leadership campaign, I was struck – not for the last time – with a sense that there was a vast amount to do and very little time in which to do it …

My party agreed that we needed to stop drifting in the direction of a higher-tax, higher-spend economy being choked by ever more regulation, which was causing sluggish growth, low productivity and a dampening of enterprise and innovation. My plan to get Britain back on the right trajectory was popular.

Her husband warned her about throwing her hat into the ring:

… my husband warned me that it would be awful – I could not duck the challenge. I knew that if I didn’t step up, I would regret it …

The leadership campaign turned out to be as brutal as my husband had feared. I was called everything from immoral to insane – and that was just some of the “friendly fire” I encountered.

As Prime Minister:

Instinctively, I was determined to act with maximum speed. I knew this risked mistakes being made, but the normal pace of the Whitehall machine would be nowhere near sufficient to tackle the immediate emergencies we were facing, let alone to attempt to get the British economy onto a path to growth with barely two years left until the next election.

As a matter of urgency, I dealt with the issue of energy bills, which were projected to rise as high as an annual £6,000 for British families as a consequence of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  

Designing a targeted scheme was impossible given the urgency of the situation, so it had to be universal. Families and businesses would not be able to cope for much longer without assistance. I was also working on ways of mitigating the costs, in particular by signing up to longer-term energy supply agreements as well as through enabling more North Sea production, fracking and renewable energy. We urgently needed to move away from the short-termist approach that had left the UK dependent on global energy prices and vulnerable to the actions of a hostile state with strategic energy interests.

The benefits to the economy of the package were clear: it was set to reduce peak inflation by five per cent and contribute to our primary economic objective of boosting trend growth to 2.5 per cent. It’s no exaggeration to say that there are firms which remain in business today only because of the action we took. This intervention prevented a major economic crisis. The markets welcomed my intervention, reducing the sky-high levels of uncertainty and anxiety.

The mini-Budget

The Queen’s death and the consequent suspension of Parliament for two weeks did not help Truss’s time in Downing Street.

Still, she had to press on, regardless:

… because of the expected size of the energy package (albeit dwarfed by the money spent on Covid-19 pandemic measures), it was going to be necessary for us to make a fiscal statement very soon.

The date of what inevitably became known as the mini-Budget was set for Sept 23. In hindsight, perhaps we could have delayed it for a few days. However, much longer than that would have meant not sticking to our commitments.

There were concerns in some quarters that the announcement would not be accompanied by forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). However, the OBR’s core purpose is to produce twice-yearly forecasts on whether the Government is on track to meet its fiscal targets. Commissioning a report at that juncture would not have been appropriate, given that the forecast would have been unable to take into consideration the future spending decisions we planned to outline in the Medium Term Fiscal Plan a few weeks later.

It’s also worth recalling that no OBR forecast has accompanied many other fiscal announcements, not least the Covid-19 furlough scheme, which cost £70 billion.

As I had spelled out during the leadership campaign, I wanted to go for growth by reversing the proposed rises to corporation tax and National Insurance and implementing a programme of economic reform in order to prevent recession and stagnation and put the UK on a positive path.

Treasury opposition

She described how the civil servants at the Treasury think:

I saw first-hand during my two years as chief secretary to the Treasury that pessimism and scepticism about the growth potential of the British economy are sadly endemic at the Treasury: serious planning reform was dismissed as not politically deliverable; discussing monetary policy was a taboo; deregulation of financial services and other industries was viewed as undermining the prospects of a deal with the EU; and Brexit was seen as a damage-limitation exercise rather than a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Instead, the focus from the Treasury was on micro, top-down tinkering such as productivity initiatives trying to encourage firms to become more efficient, along with government intervention.

Favourable reception

Truss called our attention to the favourable reception of the mini-Budget:

Following the announcement on Sept 23, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research came out and forecast that our energy support guarantee, coupled with the tax cuts announced, would lead to positive GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2022, shortening the recession and raising annual GDP growth to around two per cent over 2023-24.

There were positive reactions from many quarters. Kitty Ussher, a Treasury minister in Gordon Brown’s government and now chief economist at the Institute of Directors, declared it “a good news day for British business”, adding that “in a time of low confidence and economic uncertainty, the new chancellor’s emphasis on going for growth will be very welcome to firms of all sizes across the UK”.

Tony Danker, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), hailed it as “a turning point for our economy” and “day one of a new UK growth approach”, recognising that “a simpler, smarter approach to tax can pay dividends”.

There were some concerns about the abolition of the 45p tax rate, a small measure and virtually the only one I had not trailed during the leadership campaign. We were simply returning to the top rate that was in place for the vast majority of the 1997-2010 Labour government, although clearly the political sands had shifted.

Nonetheless, as the chancellor and I travelled to Kent to visit a factory that afternoon, we were positive that we had done the right thing for the country and felt optimistic about the future.

Pensions debacle a surprise

Truss explained why she was unaware of the effect of the mini-Budget on pension funds:

At no point during any of the preparations for the mini-Budget had any concerns about liability-driven investments (LDIs) and the risk they posed to bond markets been mentioned at all to me, the chancellor or any of our teams by officials at the Treasury. But then, late on the Sunday night, came the jitters from the Asian markets as they opened. I was alerted to this on the Monday morning, at which point the Bank of England governor was wanting to make a statement on LDIs.

Readers will not be surprised that, given their impact on events, since leaving office I have spent some time looking into LDIs. I was shocked by what I discovered.

In the early 2000s, pension funds were heavily underfunded. To increase their returns, they used LDIs – which use bond derivatives – freeing up cash for the pension funds to invest in other assets. This works when markets are calm but becomes problematic when the price of government bonds falls within a short timeframe. As LDIs entered the financial mainstream, with The Pensions Regulator seemingly encouraging their uptake, warnings started to be issued on the risks they could pose to financial markets – all unbeknownst to me at the time.

Astonishingly, it turns out that the value of total assets in LDI strategies is equivalent to around 60 per cent of the UK’s GDP.

The day before the mini-Budget, the Bank of England raised interest rates by 0.5 per cent, whereas the US Federal Reserve had just announced a third successive rate rise of 0.75 per cent. In addition, the Bank simultaneously confirmed plans for a bond-selling programme. Bond prices fell sharply, putting pension funds under pressure.

Dramatic movements in the bond market had already begun, meaning the mini-Budget faced a very difficult environment. Only now can I appreciate what a delicate tinderbox we were dealing with in respect of the LDIs.

Admitting mistakes

In retrospect, Truss admitted that she made mistakes:

Regrettably, the Government became a useful scapegoat for problems that had been brewing over a number of months. Interest rates had been rising internationally and mortgage costs had been forecast to go up for some time.

I fully admit that our communication could have been better. As I said during the leadership campaign, I am not the slickest communicator. In addition, we did not have a system that was enthusiastic about communicating messages contrary to its orthodoxy and, so early in my premiership, I had not established the infrastructure inside No 10 to best explain all that we were doing.

In hindsight, maybe I should not have headed to New York after the late Queen’s funeral to attend the UN General Assembly and instead supervised the final preparation of our announcements more closely.

Knowing what I know now, undoubtedly I would have handled things differently. I underestimated the extent to which the market was on edge and, like many others, was not aware of how fragile our system had become.

But, frankly, we were also pushing water uphill. Large parts of the media and the wider public sphere had become unfamiliar with key arguments about tax and economic policy and over time sentiment had shifted Left-wards. This is partly because we Conservatives had failed to make these arguments enough since 2010 – instead triangulating with Labour policy. It was also clear that, internal disagreements within my own party aside, there was a broader consensus in favour of raising taxes.

How the system operates

Truss explained how the system operates and how it fails long-term economic vision:

The process operates at arms-length, based on models which rely on a wide range of assumptions, including on the delivery of policies. In my view, this static modelling tends to undervalue the benefits of low taxes and supply-side reforms for economic growth, and overvalue the benefits of public spending. This inevitably puts pressure on a higher-tax and higher-spend outcome – hence the inexorable tax rises we are now seeing.

In the medium term, I believed my policies would have increased growth and therefore reduced debt.

Five-year forecasts are treated as accurate predictions and therefore filling the “gap” becomes the imperative of government policy. This leads to policies being adjusted to fit those forecasts, only for those forecasts to be revised with each new iteration of the figures, forcing further policy change down the line.

As a result, the Government is forced to make economically detrimental decisions, such as raising corporation tax, based on uncertain forecasts that may not come to fruition. For example, in September the energy package was set to cost £60 billion and by November it was forecast to be £43 billion, yet the latest projections are considerably lower.

Global opposition

With Truss at the helm, the UK was out of step with the rest of the Western nations. Conservative Party members might have liked her policies, but TPTB clearly did not:

We were also swimming against the international tide. There was a concerted effort by international actors to challenge our Plan for Growth. The IMF commented on distributional aspects rather than market stability which it is hard to conclude was anything but politically motivated.

Then there was the intervention from President Biden, who publicly voiced his disagreement with our economic policy, stating: “I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake.”

These interventions were, sadly, in tune with growing efforts on the world stage to limit competition between G7 economies, as evidenced by the proposed global minimum tax rates.

Facing the headwinds we did, I could not allow the markets – backed by this economic consensus – to keep betting against the UK. Before long, I was given the starkest of warnings by senior officials that further market turmoil could leave the UK unable to fund its own debt. This is why I reluctantly concluded I had no option but to remove the chancellor and change the policy.

I was deeply disturbed by having to do this. Kwasi Kwarteng had put together a brave package that was genuinely transformative – he is an original thinker and a great advocate for Conservative ideas. But at this point, it was clear that the policy agenda could not survive and my priority had to be avoiding a serious meltdown for the UK. I still believe that seeking to deliver the original policy prescription on which I had fought the leadership election was the right thing to do, but the forces against it were too great.

I am very pleased that elements of it did survive – the reversal of the National Insurance rise and the cuts to stamp duty – and those measures have eased the burden a little on hard-working families and those buying their own home. But it was obviously going to be difficult to remain as prime minister after abandoning the thrust of the platform on which I had been elected, and it was already clear that elements of the parliamentary party were not prepared to allow me to stay.

I am not claiming to be blameless in what happened, but fundamentally I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support.

Party opposition

Both Truss and Conservative Party members learned something about their MPs:

I underestimated the resistance inside the Conservative parliamentary party to move to a lower-tax, less-regulated economy. The furore over the reduction of the top rate of income tax was testament to this. In the overall package of measures, it was – in fiscal terms – little more than a rounding error, equivalent to 0.2 per cent of government spending. Even though the measure was economically sound, I underestimated the political backlash I would face, which focused almost entirely on the “optics” …

As a result:

We have ended up in a situation as a country where fiscal policy is in a straitjacket. Moreover, there is a worrying economic consensus – both at a national and, increasingly, international level – that is preventing economic dynamism and growth.

Median incomes here in the UK are now well below those in the US, Switzerland or Norway and the average in developed countries. If we are to succeed in putting our country on a path to high growth, rising wages and becoming internationally more competitive, things need to change.

We have not done enough over the past decade to make the arguments for a lower-tax, more deregulated economy, which meant that the groundwork had not been laid for what I sought to do …

And while I saw the power of “the blob of vested interests” within many a Whitehall department during my more than 10 years in ministerial office, I seriously underestimated the strength of the economic orthodoxy and its influence on the market.

Nonetheless, the average Joe and Jane are on Truss’s side:

I have lost track of how many people have written to me or approached me since leaving Downing Street to say that they believe my diagnosis of the problems causing our country’s economic lethargy was correct and that they shared my enthusiasm for the solutions I was proposing.

Ultimately, she still has hope that the UK can turn itself around. Millions of us hope so.

Pundits’ views

On February 6, The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley concluded that ‘undemocratic forces prevailed’.

He says that she was not given a chance, whereas Theresa May was:

Theresa May nearly lost an election and bungled Brexit, yet the Tories stuck with her for three years. In 2023, by contrast, we got through three PMs in one year.

Was this really the reason May survived and Truss did not?

That’s because our economy and society were upended by a pandemic that stoked demands for more government while injecting wild anxiety into our political culture.

Perhaps it was.

The most pathological thing is that the IMF is now advocating Trussonomics:

… last week the IMF said British recovery would be limited by its tax rises. And that, you silly people, was Truss’s entire point.

CapX‘s Jon Moynihan says that the Bank of England was at least partly responsible for Truss’s fall. He notes that no one has bothered to investigate their role in what happened in late September 2022 (green emphases his):

The Bank of England’s Governor, Andrew Bailey, offered a classic of the ‘not me guv’ genre of explanations, telling the Treasury Committee that the movement in gilt rates had been ‘outside historical experience’. But this was no bolt from the blue: the movement was a self-feeding one, caused by the leverage that regulators had permitted. Moreover, there are plenty of ‘historical experiences’ of industries with risky financial structures provoking market chaos. Remarkably, Bailey also claimed the Bank’s later bond sales didn’t move the markets. That’s an odd claim, given that their promise to purchase £65bn of bonds was responsible for stopping the gilts rout: both claims can’t be correct.

Of course, it suits the Bank to blame politicians for its own failings, particularly when the relationship between Bailey and Truss was never a particularly warm one to begin with. But there’s a much broader failure here of the regulatory system to do anything about LDI funds – one that cannot plausibly be laid at Truss or Kwarteng’s door.

Equally striking, however, is how little political scrutiny we’ve had of the whole affair. The consensus view that ‘the mini budget blew up the bond market’ seems to have been swallowed whole. But Parliament, via the Treasury and Work and Pensions committees, should be asking a long list of questions about why this situation was allowed to develop, what regulators did and didn’t know, why there seemed to be such pervasive ignorance of LDIs and how the Bank misjudged its calls on interest rates and the jump  to QT immediately before the mini budget.

This is not just about identifying the mistakes of the past, however. There are still huge questions about the state of the UK’s pensions funds that we need to get to the bottom of. At the very least, we should be told the state of the funds that have not recovered from September’s rout and how big the overall hole is (Bailey told the Treasury Committee he didn’t know the answer to that question). There is also the question of which players in the market aggressively sold this high-risk strategy to pension funds, and whether they deserve sanction.

There is a separate but important set of questions about the Bank’s management of its own £5bn pension pot, which until June was 100% invested in a single Blackrock LDI fund (it was subsequently reduced to 82%).

Given the reports that this Blackrock fund took a hammering last September, we ought to know what the status of the Bank’s own pension scheme now is. The Blackrock fund was reportedly under unsustainable pressure during the bond rout, and at one point was alleged to have lost an amount in the high tens of billions of pounds, threatening complete collapse. The Bank’s Pension Fund’s share of that loss was, some claim, around £1.5bn (out of its original £5bn).

If so, all of the bank’s employees, from Andrew Bailey down, were under threat of losing much of the value of their gold-plated pensions. And imagine if the loss had not been recovered, it would have meant the Bank either reneging on its vast pension obligations to its employees, or finding £1.5bn from elsewhere, most likely you and me, the taxpayers. All of which suggests a serious potential conflict of interest concerning the Bank’s interventions in the bond markets and of its own employees’ pensions.

Yet so far we’ve had no real investigation of what the position of the Bank’s fund is, whether the money has been recovered or how much is needed to return its members to fully funded status. Likewise, there has been no discussion of whether members of the Bank’s Employee Pension Board (some on the Court of the Bank) are going to receive any criticism, sanction or blame for having acceded to what now appears an extremely naïve and dangerous investment strategy. (Indeed, today the FT reports that pension schemes are being told to sell their holdings in LDI funds, particularly Blackrock).

Former Brexit Party MEP and property developer Ben Habib blames the Bank of England — as well as Conservative MPs and the Treasury. On February 6, The Express reported their interview with him:

“Tory socialists, Michael Gove leading the charge, immediately moved to bring her down. The Treasury openly undermined her thesis. And even the Bank of England briefed and acted against her.”

The day before former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s now-infamous mini-budget, the BoE had forecast a recession, Mr Habib said.

He added: “It had been selling government bonds already putting pressure on their value. As values fell, pension funds, which had overleveraged themselves buying this rubbish were forced to dump it in order to remain solvent.

“The markets smelt a collapse and capitalised on the opportunity. Sterling was shorted. Having set-off these collapses, the Bank of England and all those who feast on state largesse laid the blame at Truss’s door.”

Within days Ms Truss had been ousted and replaced with Mr Sunak, “someone it could trust not to unsettle the status quo”, Mr Habib argued.

He continued: “Sunak (supported fully by the Bank of England) is the man responsible for increasing national debt by a whopping £500 billion, or 33 percent in just two years.

“He has borrowed more money than any Chancellor in history but the establishment saw fit to give him the keys to the country.

“The new Prime Minister is not short of self-confidence. He believes he knows best how to spend our money. To him, those of us who think otherwise are idiots.

“Liz Truss offered the nation an opportunity to reverse our managed decline. Instead, failed orthodoxy prevailed.”

Political commentator Tom Harwood also blames the Bank of England and says that Trussonomics was never tried:

In reality Truss implemented virtually none of her pro-agenda. In fact she had barely announced any of it before the men in grey suits came knocking.

But didn’t she cost us £65 billion? So say reputable sources like the Have I Got News For You twitter account, French TV’s ‘Mr Europe’, and Afghan dog rescue enthusiast Dominic Dyer. In reality, however £65 billion was not lost due to the mini budget. That was the amount that the Bank of England said it was willing to commit to stabilise the gilt market. As the independent economist Julian Jessop notes, in reality about £19 billion was spent by the bank, which – crucially – ended up delivering a profit of about £4 billion. But again, this was all before anyone had even got to the real point of Trussism.

The framework of what could have been is found throughout a document that the Rishi Sunak promptly ripped to shreds upon entering number ten. And no, it’s not all about tax cuts. In fact, the most important parts – the most interesting bits too – are the other areas of supply side reform. Cheap or free to do, and potentially transformational. It was all laid out, albeit not in full detail, in The Growth Plan.

Harwood contends that the IMF was criticising Truss’s blanket energy support plan, not the rest of her economic policy (green emphasis his):

It might be useful to explore what the IMF actually said in its press statement, the primary focus of which regarded the UK’s “aims at helping families and businesses deal with the energy shock”, going on to say that “we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture”. It’s talking about the energy price freeze. The least controversial part of the mini budget, pushed for by Labour – that free market think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs heavily criticised.

The IMF rightly points out that the energy price freeze would increase inequality – the plan devised by Labour and implemented by the Tories subsidises those who use more energy more than those who use less. Millionaires heating their swimming pools receive more taxpayer support than low income families in small houses or flats. And yet there was almost absolute political consensus on this enormous untargeted intervention.

Indeed, reading the IMF’s press statement in full, before any mention of tax cuts, the primary concern is clearly the energy package. A package that could have cost up to £200 billion. As the numerate will recognise, hundreds of billions of pounds is a larger amount than £8 billion. Perhaps it makes sense that this is what the IMF’s statement focussed on, ahead of new tax cuts.

Ultimately, Truss implemented a Labour plan for energy bills:

The biggest problem with the mini budget – other than a perceived disrespect for institutions like the Office for Budget Responsibility in delaying its report until months after the mini-budget – was the extra and uncertain spending the government committed to. The energy price guarantee was estimated to cost anywhere between 100bn and 200bn, although these estimates were in and of themselves guesses, as the guarantee committed the state to cover the cost of energy above a guaranteed unit price, however high it got. This was a functionally limitless commitment, made at a time of uncertainty in the international energy market. A decision clearly far more dangerous than the reversal of a handful of recent tax rises.

It was bad policy, and it was in no way free market. This element of government’s plan – pushed for by all opposition parties – was the opposite of a libertarian experiment. It was socialist.

If Conservative MPs should be angry about the Truss administration for anything, it was its capitulation to the Labour Party’s policy team and their ill thought through, indiscriminate, untargeted intervention that cost far more than the entirity of furlough.

Even the Labourite magazine The New Statesman said that Truss was not to blame for ‘crashing the economy’, something the Party’s MPs still repeat with nauseating regularity:

Too much anger about Truss’s time at No 10 has focused on the “unhappy” rather than the “brief”.  There are reasonably hard limits as to what even a determined wrecker of civilisation can achieve in 49 days, particularly in an economy as large and complex as the UK’s.

To do truly lasting damage you need more time – perhaps a decade, which is roughly how long we were subjected to the fiscal insanity of austerity. The social consequences of this are too obvious to ignore: the queues at the food banks, the rough sleepers, the crumbling schools, the collapsing National Health Service. Average life expectancy, for the first time since 1900, has stalled.

But the economic impacts have been more subtle, and too little discussed. By draining demand out of the economy, spending cuts depressed growth. By slashing government investment, they undermined future productivity. The combination of both together is the primary cause of the UK’s economic malaise – more so than Brexit, and far more so than Truss.

… it wasn’t ideologues such as Truss or Kwasi Kwarteng that condemned the UK to this fate. It was dead-eyed Sensibles like George Osborne who calmly shredded our prosperity, and affable former bureaucrats who justified those decisions. As a BBC review found last week, we suffer from a corps of political journalists who lack an understanding of “basic economics”, relying instead on a limited selection of assumed authorities who, in turn, never deviate far from the Treasury view. The result was what the Confederation of British Industry head Tony Danker has called a “doom loop”: as austerity failed, its failures justified more austerity to deal with the failures. Jeremy Hunt’s response to Truss’s implosion was to insist on a new round of spending cuts, was another crank of the handle.

Did Truss cause harm while she was in office? Yes, of course. The combination of radicalism and ineptitude in the mini-Budget led to a spike in government borrowing costs, triggering unexploded bombs in our pension funds, and rising mortgage rates. But the removal of Kwarteng as chancellor and then the prime minister herself rapidly (if not quite entirely) unwound that financial damage, leaving us much as we would have been without Truss – that is to say, in dire economic straits …

Truss is a sideshow. The more we focus on her, the less attention we are paying to the primary causes of our unmistakable economic decline – which means, above all, the austerity programme of the 2010s. Britain’s economic woes have not been caused by its messiahs, but by its managers. The problem isn’t the [libertarian] Institute of Economic Affairs. It’s the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

There are several other commentators along with Conservative MPs who think that Trussonomics is not quite yet dead.

More on them next week.