The Telegraph‘s political editor, Ben Riley-Smith, has a book coming out on September 28, 2023, The Right To Rule.

The paper has been serialising excerpts, one of which is, ‘The inside story of how Liz Truss’s premiership unravelled’. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Liz Truss has the shortest tenure of any British prime minister. The next shortest belongs to George Canning, in post for four months before he died in 1827:

Liz Truss’s opening Downing Street address was on 6 September 2022. She left office, once a successor had been picked, on 25 October 2022. David Cameron had spent 2,253 days as prime minister, Theresa May 1,106 and Boris Johnson 1,139. Truss was 49 and out.

On September 23, 2022, Truss’s Chancellor, our first black Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng delivered a bombastic mini-budget that Conservative Party members loved yet set the markets reeling.

Ben Riley-Smith tells us what happened by mid-October:

Three weeks before to the day, Truss had sat grinning by Kwarteng’s side as he outlined a tax-slashing ‘mini’-Budget that delivered on more than a decade of joint dreaming.

But what had followed – a tanking pound, soaring interest rates, a Bank of England intervention to save pension funds, a Tory revolt – had brought Truss to this point. Now, on Friday 14 October 2022, there were dire warnings of mayhem when markets opened on Monday unless she went further. The prime minister felt she had no choice but to sack one of her best friends in politics.

Almost to the last, Kwarteng was disbelieving that such a fate awaited. He had been hauled back from an International Monetary Fund (IMF) summit in Washington, DC, a gathering Truss had pleaded with him not to attend as the lights began to flash red that week …

Truss had explicitly urged him not to go. Kwarteng, thinking that cancelling the engagement would itself trigger alarm bells, went anyway.

Having returned to London after one day in Washington, he was stunned to find out his fate:

… minutes away from Number 10 in his ministerial car, he saw a tweet from The Times’s political editor Steven Swinford revealing that he was ‘being sacked’ …

The chancellor knew things were bad, the markets’ turbulent and a wing of the parliamentary party sharpening knives. He believed there was still a ‘50-50’ chance of the Truss administration making it to the new year.

… For 20 fraught minutes, sitting around the coffin-shaped Cabinet table, Kwarteng tried to persuade Truss that killing off his Cabinet career would also sound the death knell for her.

Kwarteng gave her three more weeks of survival. In the end, it was six days.

Kwarteng was stunned — as all good Conservatives were — to find out that Jeremy Hunt was his replacement:

‘Hunt?! He’s going to reverse everything!’ exclaimed Kwarteng.

Which Hunt duly did.

Riley-Smith tells us what went on in the background:

For the first time the private warnings that forced her hand – and brought the curtains down on the shortest premiership in history – can be revealed.

Practically as soon as Kwarteng delivered his mini-budget announcement, parts of it were rolled back, beginning at the Conservative Party conference on October 5.

The left-leaning OBR — Office for Budget Responsibility — had not yet put forward their forecast, which would surely go against the Truss-Kwarteng plan. The Bank of England would also be very much against it.

At some point, Truss was frustrated with the lack of support, saying:

They do not understand who’s paying their f***ing wages. It’s plumbers in Dartford, ceramics workers in Stoke-on-Trent, people who actually make things who are paying their wages.

True.

After the Conservative Party conference ended, wheels within wheels began turning in the background:

By the end of conference week, the OBR had given the Treasury its first private estimates. The Conservative Party, which prided itself on sound economic management, had long adopted ‘fiscal rules’ to show its prudence. At the time, the rules promised that debt would be falling within five years of any given date – a claim the Treasury always wanted backed up in the OBR five-year forecast, changing policies if necessary to hit the target.

After the bonfire of taxes and a huge energy bill guarantee, Number 11 knew that would be tricky to achieve the target this time round.

Officials had discussed what total savings were needed. Worst-case scenario, they concluded: £40-50bn. Then the OBR’s first estimate dropped: £72bn. It was way higher than expected … the new leadership’s credibility with the markets was already paper thin, was deemed unconscionable. The gap had to be filled.

At Chequers that weekend, the prime minister, the chancellor and their inner circles talked through options …

Not discussed at length during that weekend, according to one there, was reversing more elements of what had already been announced. But that would change in the coming week.

By Wednesday 12 October, there was a feeling among economic officials inside the Government that Truss and Kwarteng were not grasping the seriousness of the situation.

The new fiscal event, dubbed the ‘Medium-Term Fiscal Plan’, had been shunted forward from mid-November to 31 October, with the speed of the reset prioritised over the inevitable ‘Halloween horror show’ headlines.

But another date, earlier and even more significant, now loomed: the moment the Bank of England would end its intervention and stop buying up bonds – a move that had initially been taken to stop a firesale in financial markets.

That was just a few days away now, on Monday 17 October. This amounted to removing the stabilisers from the markets, which would then be free to reveal what they really thought about the current UK leadership. Did the prime minister and chancellor realise how hard it would be to hit the £72bn figure? And did they know what traders were planning to unleash on Monday? …

The jitters were now spreading. Two special advisers focused on economics – Shabbir Merali in Number 10 and Adam Memon in Number 11 – were growing increasingly nervous about how the markets would react on Monday. They got permission to sound out industry leaders and spent Wednesday afternoon in the Number 11 boardroom talking back to back to half a dozen managing director-level executives at investment banks and asset management companies.

… Traders would make their moves on Monday. Either unpick the tax cuts Truss had placed at the centre of her premiership by the end of the week or risk ‘financial crisis’ …

“When people talk about ‘financial crisis’ that is something you read in history books,” said one involved. “When you hear serious players say, ‘Come Monday morning, you might be heading into one,’ it puts everything in a very tight focus. We did not have long to act. We had about 48 hours. The situation felt pretty dire.”

Merali and Memon stayed in Downing Street until close to 11pm. writing a two-page note for the prime minister. It had three sections. The first summarised what they had heard, underscoring that the markets were betting against Britain.

The second explained the wider context: how securing economic growth, Truss’s defining goal in office, was only possible with financial stability. And the third laid out the bluntest of conclusions. To fill the £72bn OBR black hole, an axe had to be taken to the mini-Budget.

Scrapping the corporation tax rise, the costliest tax cut, had to be reversed. That meant Truss would have to oversee a rise from 19pc to 25pc – the exact Rishi Sunak-authored policy she had railed against all summer in the Tory leadership contest.

Small tax reversals would be needed too, the note said: getting rid of VAT-free shopping for foreigners and raising taxes on dividends. The National Insurance cut could stay: it was so strongly associated with Truss and no one wanted to reopen that Tory Pandora’s box, given how it had split the party when announced by Boris Johnson. But a line had now been crossed. Shredding mini-Budget measures was on the table. Yet still Truss was refusing to concede.

On Thursday 13 October, the note was discussed at an early morning gathering of senior Number 10 political staff. The memo’s writers wanted it to become an official recommendation.

Printouts were soon travelling round the building, the circle of knowledge about what was feared to be around the corner widening …

The greatest concern was this:

that the Government would not be able to fund its debts. If round after round of bonds were issued but not purchased, it was game over. Truss had waved away that possibility just a fortnight earlier. Now it was a probability.

The Bank of England aided and abetted that one.

Early in his Chancellorship, Kwarteng axed a prominent civil servant that Gordon Brown had appointed during Labour’s run in government between 1997 and 2010: Sir Tom Scholar. The whole of the Establishment was upset. Kwarteng found a replacement, James Bowler:

James Bowler, the incoming permanent secretary to the Treasury who was replacing the fired Sir Tom Scholar, was summoned to tell Truss to her face how challenging the situation was.

One senior Number 10 figure said he was “marched in at gunpoint”, another said he was “wheeled in”. It was highly unusual for the Treasury’s top mandarin to brief a prime minister without the chancellor also being present – a point Bowler made in his opening remarks. Once launched, however, he did not hold back.

One source in the room summed up his message: “He just made crystal clear that there were a lot of very intelligent, very wealthy people who don’t do politics, who look at numbers only, who were absolutely prepared to smash Britain to pieces on the markets. They were betting against us and they were going to win. We’d lost the confidence of the markets and we were in a very weak position. And the whole thing needed to be junked.”

A second source in the room said Bowler’s tone was more constructive, running through options for how the £72bn figure could be saved, but confirmed that the overall message was downbeat.

Other civil servants targeted senior Conservative MPs:

Senior Treasury officials reached out to Nadhim Zahawi, the former chancellor who now headed up Truss’s Cabinet Office, fearing that the prime minister was failing to accept how bad things were and urging him to voice concern.

Those who supported Truss and Kwarteng were sidelined:

Chris Philp, the chief secretary to the Treasury who was resisting big changes to the mini-Budget, felt he was being cut out of the loop as Number 11 mandarins pushed for reversals.

He wanted to put forward an alternative savings plan but was urged not to by senior Treasury officials. In the end he WhatsApped his proposals direct to Truss, but by now the pressure was building.

The top civil servant, Simon Case, had been in touch with Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England. Case:

put his official advice in writing. The letter warned that the Government would struggle to fund its debt on Monday unless Truss reversed the corporation tax cut, according to two sources who saw its contents.

It made clear a “major financial crisis” was about to rock Britain without urgent action. Case is also understood to have communicated the concerns of Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England governor – Truss and Bailey did not speak directly to one another. The message was loud and clear. Britain’s most senior civil servant and central banker were now joining the chorus of concern.

Truss resisted as long as she could, but the warnings grew more intense:

Eventually, Truss agreed to act. She would later tell others it was a case of “once bitten, twice shy”, given how the mini-Budget had played out.

If the policies had to go, so too did the man who unveiled them. And so, that evening, Kwarteng was summoned back to London for political execution.

By now the end for Truss was inevitable. Out went Kwarteng and in, once he eventually called back, came Jeremy Hunt. Nadhim Zahawi had also briefly been considered for the chancellorship before Hunt was picked. Before markets opened on Monday almost every tax cut in the mini-Budget except reversing the National Insurance rise and the cut in stamp duty to support the property market had been torched.

However, it was the fracking vote that ultimately brought down her premiership, not the nation’s finances:

What finally tipped her over the edge was the obscurest of issues: a Labour Party attempt to seize control of the House of Commons order paper, which dictates what is debated and is usually determined by the Government, for a vote about fracking. The chaotic scenes in Parliament, when party discipline collapsed, was followed by resignation.

From the beginning, Truss had intended to act quickly on preparing Britain for a cycle of growth. Knowing that a general election is likely in 2024, she felt she had limited time:

“I was trying to defibrillate the patient at a very late stage in the day,” Truss told me about trying to row back two decades of high taxes and regulatory red tape.

“And you could say, ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t have done that, maybe I should have watered stuff down.’ But you can’t campaign in a leadership election as an insurgent and then go into Number 10 and not follow through. It was a difficult set of policies to enact with stiff opposition, but I believed the alternative of doing nothing was worse.”

Many wonder how her friend and Greenwich neighbour Kwasi Kwarteng feels now. Apparently, they are still friends:

His friendship with Truss, strained by office, has not been destroyed.

… “I love her dearly, she’s a great person, very sincere and honest,” said Kwarteng. “But if it hadn’t been the mini-Budget, she would have blown up on something else. I just don’t think her temperament was right. She was just not wired to be a prime minister.”

Quite possibly.

On Monday, September 18, 2023, Liz Truss gave a speech to the Institute of Government in which she looked back at her time in No. 10.

Ever since last year’s mini-budget, Opposition MPs and peers (Lords) have labelled her the one who ‘crashed the economy’, an accusation she refutes.

Furthermore, the economy is in stasis. In some respects, it has improved. However, in other ways, it has worsened.

Guido Fawkes tells us more about her speech and has a video clip (red emphases his):

… the former PM unloaded a salvo of attacks on her critics, taking aim at the BBC, the civil service, former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, the Labour Party, and even the anti-growth MPs on her own party’s benches. She’s got a book out in April for more details…

Much of the speech was the familiar Truss routine: she conceded that she was in rush to deliver change, and she not only wanted to “fatten the pig” but also rear and slaughter it on the same day. She added that “voters want to see change“, and the Tories’ widening polling deficit is the proof in the pudding. It is worth pointing out, as Fraser Nelson did last week, that whilst the adults are supposedly back in the room, the economy is no better…

This point is not lost on Liz, as she pointed out during the Q&A:

I do want to challenge the phrase ‘crashed the economy’. The fact is that since I left office, both mortgage rates and gilt rates have gone higher than they were at the time of the mini-budget. I just think you are repeating a line to take from the Labour Party…

She also called on the government once again to slash taxes across the board. Words likely to fall on the deaf ears of the Chancellor… whom she appointed.

The poor woman. Even if she was not the best communicator, her ideas were largely sound.

Later that evening, GB News’s Liam Halligan said that the Bank of England was largely to blame for Liz Truss’s downfall:

Liz Truss was an outsider. Like Boris — and other leaders around the world who bucked the trend — she had to go.

The Establishment — like a casino’s House — always wins.