Liz Truss should have known better

In the coming weeks we’re going to learn a lot more about what went so badly wrong inside Liz Truss’s government. Indeed, my colleague James Heale is co-writing the book on it. As Rishi Sunak heads into No. 10 in a bid to undo some of the damage (‘mistakes were made…’ he said on the steps of Downing Street this morning, ‘…and I have been elected as leader of my party, and your Prime Minister, in part, to fix them’) we are bound to learn more about the miscalculations, bad advice, and hubris that ultimately led to the undoing of prime minister Truss in just a matter of weeks.

It seems likely that a common thread will join these slip-ups together: that Liz Truss should have known better than to make the economic mistakes she did. Truss was not new to economic theory or public policy. As I wrote this summer, Truss spent the better part of a decade becoming the ‘darling of the free-market right.’