Fiscal failures Truss hits out after Stride disavows budget

Liz Truss has hit out at the Conservatives' shadow chancellor after he formally disowned her hastily reversed 2022 mini-budget, saying it had damaged the party's reputation for economic competence.

- Peter Walker

Truss called Mel Stride a "creature of the system", part of a failed fiscal orthodoxy which, she argued, would prevent the Conservatives taking power again if left unchallenged.

Stride's insistence at a speech that "never again" would the Conservatives offer up a largely unfunded package of tax cuts is the first time the party hierarchy under Kemi Badenoch has definitively cut itself off from a prime minister who lasted just 49 days in power.

One Tory shadow minister said the impetus for Stride's speech was in part to allow the party to attack Reform UK's lavish programme of tax cuts as being a potential re-run of the Truss debacle, as Keir Starmer did last week.

Stride called Reform's policies "pure populism". He said: "They would plough ahead with huge additional welfare spending, as well as tax cuts, with no plan for how to pay for any of it."