How can Liz Truss justify staying in her job after a disastrous day where she threw her closest ally under the bus?

Growth? Gone in day of chaos

IF Liz Truss thought sacking her Chancellor and binning a second key plank of her growth strategy would shore up her ­perilous position, she is sadly mistaken.

In one truly disastrous day she threw her closest ally under the bus, installed a controversial replacement and looked evasive and bewildered at a press ­conference where The Sun asked — on behalf of our despairing readers — how she could justify staying in her job.

Meanwhile she announced a U-turn on corporation tax which will make our rate higher than both the global and EU averages and twice the level in Ireland. 

After years of us keeping it low and creating jobs, she will be inviting companies to take their business elsewhere.

So much for growth.

The PM previously said keeping the 19 per cent rate would raise MORE money than increasing it to 25. Now she says extra billions generated by that rise will help balance the books. Which is it?

Even Kwasi Kwarteng’s sacking was undignified, with him dragged back early from Washington — as pundits feverishly tracked his plane across the sky on flight apps — before he finally landed to learn that his fleeting, farcical stint in No11 was over.

No matter that hapless Kwasi merely announced the plan Truss and he put together. She needed a scapegoat. He is it.

She scarpered

In his place sits Jeremy Hunt, a divisive pro-Remain figure who rightly believes corporation tax should be far lower than 19 per cent. His first act, on the PM’s new orders? To raise it to 25.

Truss’s Press conference somehow made matters yet worse. 

She read out a script, offered no apology for the ongoing shambles, answered just four questions and scarpered, apparently at the end of her tether. 

Far from instilling confidence in her decisiveness, she further eroded it.

Sympathy for Truss is in short supply. But in truth she has arrived in power just in time for an economic timebomb to go off in her lap.

Thanks to Putin we face an energy crisis, creating rampant inflation, while up to our necks in debt due to vast bailouts for Covid and our soaring bills. At the same time a decade-plus of absurdly low interest rates and Bank of England money-printing are suddenly having to end, causing havoc and misery.

These are problems the world over. But Truss’s haste to establish her agenda via the mini Budget, without the Office for Budget Responsibility checking her sums, made ours worse.

Tory MPs are at their wits’ end.

Many will be bitterly regretting that party members did not opt for ex-Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who ­successfully nursed the country through Covid, protecting millions of jobs.

As for the current PM, is she even capable of saving herself, given the mess she’s in? Time is running out.