Can Liz Truss survive after sacking Kwasi Kwarteng?

Kwasi Kwarteng has been sacked as chancellor following the economic and political fallout from his mini-budget.

Amid growing calls from Tory MPs for Liz Truss to stand down, the prime minister “ripped up her leadership promise to cut corporation tax on the most chaotic day of her six-week premiership”, said The Telegraph.

Kwarteng cut short a trip to Washington D.C. and was seen entering Downing Street for a meeting with the PM today. The BBC soon announced that he had become the “second shortest-serving UK chancellor on record”, behind only Iain Macleod, who died of a heart attack after 30 days in the job in 1970. Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, has been chosen to head the Treasury instead.

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What did the papers say?

Kwarteng “has a reputation for his cucumber-cool approach”, said Politico’s London Playbook, but his “rush back across the Atlantic” looked like the “frantic move of a chancellor frightened of losing his job after his fiscal spunking sent the markets spiralling into chaos”.

The chancellor told The Telegraph yesterday that he was “not going anywhere”. While Kwarteng conceded that he had faced what the paper described as a “baptism of fire”, he said: “I really enjoy the Treasury. I really enjoy No. 11.”

But in a Downing Street press conference this afternoon, Truss confirmed that Kwarteng would be replaced by Hunt, describing the former health secretary as “one of the most experienced and widely respected government ministers and parliamentarians”.

By the time the press conference had begun, “the big question was whether Truss would be able to survive herself”, said Andrew Sparrow at The Guardian. Her eight-minute performance “will have done little or nothing to persuade her MPs, or anyone else, that she will, or even that she should”, he said.

The “astonishing truth” is that a government that has “barely begun” is facing “open questions about its imminent end”, said the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason.

Tory grandees have been in talks about replacing Truss with a partnership of Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt, according to another scoop in The Times.

Some backbenchers reportedly argued that, even the climbdown over corporation tax would not be able to save her premiership. Senior Tories have discussed replacing Truss with a “unity candidate”, with either Sunak or Mordaunt put forward to succeed the PM in a “coronation” by MPs, said the paper. Between “20 to 30” former ministers and senior backbenchers were allegedly trying to devise a way for a “council of elders” to tell Truss to quit.

“Conversations are stepping up,” a former minister reportedly said.

The BBC’s Mason speculated that the party might choose a former Tory leader to replace Truss. “What about Boris Johnson? Theresa May? William Hague? I’ve heard all these names being mentioned as the future is pondered,” Mason wrote.

What happens next?

An unnamed MP told the BBC’s Mason that by sacking her chancellor, Truss “removes a lightning rod, and you know what happens then? The lightning will hit her instead.”

As things stand Truss cannot face a confidence vote until a full year has elapsed since the start of her leadership, although some MPs want to change the rules.

Sky News looked at the options for the party after their leader took the “nuclear option” to sack her chancellor. “Fuelled by cabinet resignations”, she might see “the writing on the wall” and resign, suggested the broadcaster. The rules on confidence votes could change if there is enough “clamour” and there is the potential for MPs to back one unity candidate to avoid putting the choice to the party members again.

Or Truss could make the “extremely bold decision” to hold an election, said Sky. “Then the voters would decide her fate.”