Liz Truss wrote to the Cabinet Secretary . .

. . complaining that a briefing document published prior to the King's Speech describing her infamous 2022 mini-budget as "disastrous" breached civil service standards of impartiality. The document was swiftly amended.

This got me thinking about when an opinion ceases to be a political statement and becomes an objective fact. The "disaster" was the immediate and unambiguous reaction of the financial markets to her rash and unfunded policies, which undermined sterling, reduced government bonds to near junk status, and added about £30bn to public debt. That was as much an objective fact as putting your arm in the mouth of a lion.

"Plain speaking" Conservatives can be so sensitive 😌

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MartinII · 70-79, M

It's a matter of clarity, something which the civil service, in which I spent my whole working life, used to be very good at. Clearly the mini-budget was in fact disastrous as you say, though only temporarily because Truss and Kwarteng were unceremoniously shafted in short order by their former colleagues. But was the underlying cause of the disaster the substance of the mini-budget, or the inept failure of the government to explain it, seek support for it, or delay the proposed tax cuts until they had a strategy for reducing expenditure and implementing supply side reforms in place? And did the authors of the briefing document make it clear which of those alternative interpretations they had in mind?

SunshineGirl · 36-40, F

@MartinII Well that is what the Tory party has been agonising over ever since. If the Truss administration had not completely sidestepped their own civil service, perhaps the policy could have been more positively presented. Unorthodox economic policies need a strong advocate to avoid spooking the financial markets. Truss was incapable of explaining what she was doing to her own party, let alone the rest of the world.