Reference to former First Minister Liz Truss’s “disaster” mini-budget was removed from documents relating to the King’s Speech after she complained to the Cabinet Office.
The former Conservative MP, who lost his seat in the general election two weeks ago, wrote to Cabinet Secretary Simon Case on Wednesday alleging that “actions taken by my government in the context of political attacks and repeated references to me personally” breached the Civil Service Act.
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The document describes the mini-Budget as “a lesson in how not to do fiscal policy” and says measures are being introduced to strengthen the role of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in the King’s Speech “to ensure the mistakes of Liz Truss’s ‘mini-Budget’ are not repeated”.
Ms Truss said references to the fiscal situation, which has caused market turmoil as Finance Minister Kwasi Kwateng announced a series of unfunded spending cuts, were “unfounded” and “not contained in any document produced by the civil servant”.
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And she called for an investigation into how those additions were approved, for the references to be removed and “an appropriate warning to those responsible.”
Labour’s House of Commons Leader Lucy Powell told Sophy Ridge’s Politics Hub that she believed the briefing had been removed because it was a “civil service document” rather than political.
A Cabinet Office spokesman later confirmed this to Sky News, telling the outlet: “The Cabinet Secretary has responded to Liz Truss and has instructed her to remove these references from the document.”
“They’ve been fixed and updated.”
Sky News has contacted Ms Truss for comment.
