Jeremy Hunt warns Tory MPs against trying to oust PM

Jeremy Hunt has appealed to Tory MPs to get behind Liz Truss, as she battles to restore credibility with backbenchers.

A series of damaging U-turns over her tax-cutting plans has led some MPs to talk privately about how to remove her from office.

Her new chancellor told the BBC a fresh leadership campaign was “the last thing that people really want”.

But a senior backbench Conservative MP has called for Ms Truss to go as prime minister, saying “the game is up”.

Mr Hunt replaced Kwasi Kwarteng on Friday, after Ms Truss fired the former chancellor. His sacking followed market turmoil in response to £45bn of unfunded tax cuts included in the mini-budget.

In a series of humiliating U-turns to restore market confidence, Ms Truss has abandoned plans to scrap the top income tax rate and reversed a planned freeze to corporation tax she had put at the centre of her Tory leadership campaign.

Mr Hunt held talks with Ms Truss at her official Chequers country retreat earlier, as they plan a programme of tax hikes and spending cuts to be delivered on 31 October.

The new chancellor told Laura Kuenssberg he was not ruling out further reversals of tax cuts from last month’s mini-budget, adding he was not “taking anything off the table”.

According to reports in the Sunday Times, Ms Truss is also preparing to delay by a year her 1p cut to the basic rate of income tax. The Treasury has not confirmed the reports, adding: “We cannot speculate on any tax changes outside of a fiscal event.”

Asked whether he could rule out scrapping more of the tax cuts, Mr Hunt said he wanted to keep as many of them “as I possibly can”.

“We are going to have to take some very difficult decisions both on spending and on tax,” he said in an interview with Laura Kuenssberg, which was recorded on Saturday.

“Taxes are not going to go down as quickly as people thought and some taxes are going to go up,” he added.

“So it’s going to be very, very difficult and I think we have to be honest with people about that.”

Meanwhile, in a further blow to the prime minister, US President Joe Biden has criticised tax cuts from her mini-budget.

In an unusual intervention, he told reporters during a campaign visit that the outcome was “predictable” and “I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake”.

He added that he had disagreed with “the idea of cutting taxes on the super wealthy”, but it was up to the UK to “make that judgment, not me”.

In his BBC interview, Mr Hunt said the government’s debt reduction plan, due in two weeks’ time, would be a “very big fiscal statement”, and that every government department would be asked to make savings.

However, he insisted the changes would not be “anything like” the period of austerity which began in 2010, when predecessor George Osborne oversaw large cuts in public spending.

Despite the U-turns, Mr Hunt insisted Ms Truss remained committed to her goal of promoting economic growth, but she had changed “the way we’re going to get there”.

“She’s listened, she’s changed, she’s been willing to do that most difficult thing in politics which is to change tack,” he added.

Under current party rules, Ms Truss is safe from a formal leadership challenge for a year – but newspaper reports suggest some Tory MPs have already begun talks about how to force her from office.

Tactics reportedly under consideration include submitting no-confidence letters in a bid to force party bosses into a rule change, or changing party rules to allow MPs to bypass members and pick a new leader themselves.

Asked whether she could survive as the prime minister, former minister Crispin Blunt told Channel 4: “No, I think the game is up and it’s now a question as to how the succession is managed.

“If there is such a weight of opinion in the parliamentary party that we have to have a change then it will be effected.”

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, who sits on the committee that decides the rules, told BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House a rule change would only be considered if “sixty to seventy percent” of the party’s MPs backed a change.

Speaking on Sky News, senior backbencher Robert Halfon said “of course, colleagues are unhappy with what is going on”, adding that “we’re all talking to see what can be done about it”.

The chair of the Commons Education Committee went on to accuse the government of behaving like “libertarian jihadists” treating the public as “laboratory mice on which to carry out ultra, ultra free market experiments”.

He said he was not calling on Ms Truss to go and he worried about “further political stability” – but a “dramatic reset” was needed and “things have to improve”.

Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock urged the prime minister to reshuffle the cabinet to extend her support across the party.

He told the BBC: “There’s a huge amount of talent on the backbenches – I’m not talking about me, but there are many others that should be brought into government.”

Treasury minister Andrew Griffith, speaking on Times Radio, insisted that the prime minister has the “confidence of the government”.

Labour’s shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said any further public spending cuts would be “entirely because” of government “incompetence”.

“I’m not even sure what this government’s economic policy is at the moment. I don’t know which bits of the budget still apply, and I don’t know what we will hear next week,” he told the BBC.