The quick removal of a UK Treasury official may be a sign of things to come.
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Even as the UK takes a moment to reflect on the reign and passing of the Queen, new Prime Minister Liz Truss isn’t wasting any time in setting the tone for her administration. That tone? Get in line or get out. And one of the first people out is the Treasury’s most senior civil servant, Tom Scholar. No British finance minister in living memory has dismissed their permanent secretary immediately after moving into the role, until Kwasi Kwarteng did so on his second day on the job.
“This is a government in a hurry,” says Allegra Stratton, author of Bloomberg’s daily UK newsletter The Readout and former Downing Street press secretary. She joins this week’s In The City podcast hosted by David Merritt and Francine Lacqua, alongside reporter Philip Aldrick, to discuss whether the Truss government’s attack on orthodoxy in the Treasury puts its policy ambitions at risk.
“The sense that you get is people in the government believe Scholar could have been an obstacle to re-engineering the Treasury,” Aldrick says. “It’s introducing politics into an apolitical sphere during a crisis.”
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