Liz Truss has broken her silence following her disastrous stint as Prime Minister, blaming the “economic establishment” and her own Conservative Party for her downfall.
Ms Truss’s brief premiership lasted just 49 days as she was forced to quit after Kwasi Kwarteng’s £45billion package of unfunded tax cuts panicked the markets and tanked the pound.
The UK’s stock and bond markets lost an estimated $500billion in value in the weeks after she took over from Boris Johnson last September, and the Bank of England was forced to take emergency measures to stabilise the economy.
In a 4,000-word essay she now says that while she was not “blameless” over the way her chancellor Mr Kwarteng’s infamous mini-budget catastrophically unravelled, still believes her approach to driving growth was the right one.
Ms Truss's brief time in power made her the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history.
In her essay, Ms Truss said that while her experience last autumn was "bruising for me personally", she believed that over the medium term her policies would have increased growth and therefore brought down debt.
She argued that the government was made a "scapegoat" for developments that had been brewing for some time.
"Frankly, we were also pushing water uphill. Large parts of the media and the wider public sphere had become unfamiliar with key arguments about tax and economic policy and over time sentiment had shifted leftward," she wrote.
She also said she had not appreciated the strength of the resistance she would face to her plans - including plans to abolish the 45p top rate of income tax.
"I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted. How wrong I was."
Mr Kwarteng dropped the 45p income tax proposals 10 days after they were announced, telling the BBC it was "a massive distraction on what was a strong package".
Less than a fortnight later, Ms Truss sacked Mr Kwarteng, something she said she was "deeply disturbed by". She described Mr Kwarteng in her essay as "an original thinker and a great advocate for Conservative ideas" - but that it was clear the tax proposals could not survive.
With the benefit of hindsight, she would have acted differently during her premiership, she wrote - but she still backs her plans for growth.