Liz Truss was only Prime Minister for 45 days but in Northampton we’re still paying the price

This Saturday marks one year since Liz Truss’s catastrophic ‘mini-budget’ which sent the financial markets into freefall and mortgage rates sky-high. Whilst Truss herself is now making speeches offering advice on economic policy, selling her book and seeking approval for her honours list, people and businesses here in Northampton are still living with the consequences of her chaos.

After Liz Truss convincingly beat Rishi Sunak in the race to become leader of the Conservative Party last summer, she began one of the most economically disastrous tenures of 10 Downing Street in living memory. Her mini-budget, which contained unfunded pledges to the value of billions of pounds, caused financial turmoil necessitating intervention from the Bank of England, attracted widespread, stinging criticism (from the President of the USA to the International Monetary Fund) and deeply damaged Britain’s global standing.

The impact of the turmoil sent mortgage, rent and interest rates soaring, all during a cost of living crisis. Some families’ mortgage payments here in Northampton went up by thousands of pounds, others’ mortgage offers were just taken off the table overnight. And whereas Liz Truss may have moved on, to this day local people and businesses continue to pay for that recklessness.

So Liz Truss’s speech today, in which she sought not only to avoid blame for her mistakes but to offer advice on a range of economic issues, somewhat sticks in the craw. Many people will rightly think it displays a lack of contrition, humility and awareness of just how much higher mortgage, rent and interest rates continue to bite on household finances.

Equally shameless though is the insistence that, despite only days in office, Truss should be allowed a resignation honours list, rewarding 14 of her advisors and donors with peerages and positions of power. Whereas long-serving Prime Ministers like Tony Blair declined to put forward a resignation honours list at all, Liz Truss is set to reward one of her cronies for every 3 days she was in Number 10. That offends any sense of decency and, instead of approving the list, Rishi Sunak should have the political and moral courage to block it.