Jeremy Hunt has been criticised after he claimed Liz Truss’ economic policies were “a good thing to aim for”.
The chancellor was secretly recorded making the remarks at an election meeting with students.
Truss only lasted as prime minister for 49 days after her disastrous mini-Budget, in which her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled £45 billion of unfunded tax cuts, causing economic meltdown.
In the dying days of her administration, she replaced Kwarteng with Hunt, who reversed all of the measures announced by his predecessor.
But despite that, Hunt told the election meeting: “I think the issue with most of the policies wasn’t that they weren’t a good thing to aim for.”
He said he wanted to “basically achieve some of the same things that she wanted to achieve – but I’m doing it more gradually because I’m demonstrating at every stage that this is consistent with keeping borrowing under control”.
Darren Jones, Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, has written to Hunt urging him to “come clean”.
He said: “I find it frankly staggering that you, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, hold this view.
“I would remind you that the economic policies pursued by the Liz Truss administration led to a huge rise in interest rates, an eye-watering £240 increase in the typical monthly mortgage payments of millions of remortgaging households, and put pensions in peril.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that far from turning the page on the Liz Truss episode, you and the government of which you are a member want to repeat this dangerous experiment.
Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson Sarah Olney said: “The Conservatives trashed our economy and they’ll do it again. This just shows they’re all cut from the same cloth.
“From spiralling mortgages to stealth taxes on pensioners Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss and all of these ministers have desperately let people down.”
