British Prime Minister Liz Truss fired her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, just weeks after the release of a controversial economic plan. A hastily-arranged news conference was set for later Friday after Kwarteng rushed back to London overnight from IMF meetings in Washington.
His firing makes him the country’s shortest serving chancellor since 1970 after being appointed just over a month ago. Kwarteng’s successor will be the fourth finance minister in four months.
“You have asked me to stand aside as your Chancellor. I have accepted,” Kwarteng said in his resignation letter, which he posted to Twitter Friday. “When you asked me to serve as your Chancellor, I did so in full knowledge that the situation we faced was incredibly difficult, with rising global interest rates and energy prices.”
The British finance minister was fired exactly three weeks after he and Prime Minister Truss announced a “mini budget” that delivered Truss’s vision for vast tax cuts and deregulation to try to shock the economy out of years of stagnant growth. The announcement of the plan caused the pound to plunge, with the response from markets being so ferocious that the Bank of England had to intervene to prevent pension funds from being caught up in the chaos, as borrowing and mortgage costs surged.
“As I have said many times in the past weeks, following the status quo was simply not an option. For too long this country has been dogged by low growth rates and high taxation,” Kwarteng said in his resignation letter. “That must still change if this country is to succeed.”
At the Friday news conference, Truss named Jeremy Hunt the next finance minister. He was most recently the minister for health and social care under former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a supporter of former Prime Minister candidate Rishi Sunak. Truss also abandoned a planned cut to corporation tax, scrapping a key part of the initial plan.
The Associated Press, MarketWatch and Reuters contributed to this report.
