Liz Truss has drawn widespread derision after claiming that she was pushed out of office by a “powerful economic establishment” that refused to prioritise growth.

The former prime minister, who lasted just 49 days in office and created a UK financial crisis centred on the pensions industry, defended her ideas in a 4,000-word essay in The Sunday Telegraph.

She said that while she was not “blameless” in her own downfall, she “was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support”.

Truss took aim at an array of opponents to her economic agenda including the Whitehall “blob”, the IMF, US president Joe Biden and even members of the Conservative party.

“I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted. How wrong I was,” she wrote.

Her argument that the largest unfunded tax cuts in 50 years was the right policy to get the UK economy growing was dismissed on Sunday by members of her own party and participants in financial markets, who said that her lack of regard for the public finances spooked lenders to the UK. That raised the cost of government borrowing and sent the liability-driven investment element of the pensions sector into a tailspin.

Business secretary Grant Shapps on Sunday said the government needed to “deal with the fundamentals” within the economy before slashing taxes.

“I notice she said they hadn’t prepared the ground for these big tax changes,” he told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme. “What you have got to do is deal with the big structural issues first, deal with inflation first, deal with debt, and then you look towards tax cuts.”

Simon French, chief economist at Panmure Gordon, said that after reading Truss’s essay, he was “struck by how little she understands the role of key UK economic institutions, namely the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Bank of England and the Treasury”.

He said investors valued the institutions’ role in enhancing economic credibility and, “you can’t govern a medium-sized G7 economy — which investors no longer have to allocate [funds] to — without credibility”.

Rupert Harrison, portfolio manager at BlackRock and former adviser to George Osborne when he was chancellor, made fun of Truss’s irritation at the forecasts and assessments of her policies by the OBR.

He said her views were akin to saying, “I strongly believe that two plus two equals five but the stale old orthodoxy keeps coming up with the same tired old answer”.

Although Truss’s premiership was widely seen as a disaster, her analysis of Britain’s economic problems resonates with rightwing Tory MPs and poses a threat to Rishi Sunak.

The prime minister has already been weakened by scandals affecting cabinet ministers and is facing difficult decisions on the Northern Ireland protocol and small boats legislation. Truss has opened up a new front by reigniting the economic debate.

Tory MPs generally say Truss botched the delivery of her economic plan, but many believe her argument that aggressive tax cuts are the best way to stimulate growth.

Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister under Truss, and colleagues are setting up a new Conservative Growth Group to promote the case for tax cuts and deregulation, a view supported by dozens of Tory MPs.

Former Conservative party chair Sir Jake Berry said he agreed with Truss’s “diagnosis of the disease that is facing the country”.

“I think she accepts in this story that the prescription that we wrote — (for) which I have to take part of the blame — wasn’t delivered in the correct way,” he told BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. “But I think her point of we need to lower taxes, we need to create a growing economy, that’s what people want.”



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