The Revenge of the Blob

“Ousting a sitting Prime Minister, as the Bank of England did to Liz Truss, through its manipulation of the bond market and coordination of media spin, amounts to High Treason. When will this high treason be prosecuted ? Oh, central banks are untouchable you say ? Is this how it should be ?”

• Tweet by Richard Werner (@scientificecon), 21^st October 2026.

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The conventional narrative goes something like this. Liz Truss became 56^th British Prime Minister on 6 September 2022 after winning the Conservative leadership contest on a low-tax, high-growth platform, succeeding Boris Johnson. Queen Elizabeth II died two days later, pausing normal politics for a period of mourning. On 23 September, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced the mini-budget. It included large tax cuts (notably scrapping the 45% top rate of income tax for high earners, reversing planned corporation tax rises, and other cuts) plus energy support measures. These were largely unfunded by new revenue and lacked the usual independent analysis from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The package was expected to require substantial extra borrowing. Financial markets reacted sharply and negatively:

• The pound sterling plunged (hitting record lows against the US dollar in some trading).
• UK government bond (Gilt) yields spiked as borrowing costs rose.
• This created a crisis for certain pension funds using liability-driven investment (LDI) strategies, which faced liquidity problems as rates rose. The Bank of England intervened by buying Gilts to stabilize markets and prevent a broader financial crisis.
• Mortgage rates rose, worsening the existing cost-of-living crisis amid high inflation.

Truss and her team initially defended the plan, but pressure mounted quickly. She made U-turns (including reversing the top-rate tax cut), sacked Kwarteng on 14 October, and appointed Jeremy Hunt as Chancellor. Hunt reversed most of the mini-budget measures, restoring fiscal caution. Truss later apologized for going “too far and too fast,” but her authority was badly damaged. Opinion polls showed Labour with large leads, and her personal ratings collapsed. Further blows included the resignation of Home Secretary Suella Braverman (critical of the government) and chaotic scenes in Parliament during a vote on fracking, which highlighted collapsing party discipline. Conservative MPs publicly and privately called for her to go as confidence drained away. In her resignation statement, Truss said: “I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party.” She remained as a caretaker until the party chose Rishi Sunak as her successor. In short, the mini-budget’s market shock, policy reversals, and rapid loss of parliamentary and public support made her position untenable.

That is the conventional narrative.

Here is an alternative perspective, with some assistance from Grok:

In ‘Bank Job’ (“A Short Book on How the Bank of England Broke the Bond Market and Brought Down the Government”), just published, Liz Truss argues that she was forced out not primarily because of the market reaction to her mini-budget’s unfunded tax cuts, but because of sabotage by the Bank of England, other “establishment” institutions including the OBR and the Treasury, and disloyal Conservatives. In short, ‘The Blob’. Truss maintains that the policies would have succeeded if allowed to proceed.

Some highlights:

• The Bank of England as the central actor: Truss claims the Bank “rug-pulled the elected government of the day because it didn’t agree with its policies.” She focuses on its plan to sell £80 billion of Gilts (quantitative tightening) around the time of the 23 September 2022 mini-budget, which she says broke the bond market. She asserts that no one in her incoming government was properly warned or coordinated with, framing it as deliberate or ideologically driven resistance. (Some reviewers note that the Bank announced its Gilt-sale programme on 1 September 2022 – before she became prime minister – and that sales were delayed until November because of the turmoil triggered by the mini-budget.)
• Rejection of the “unfunded tax cuts” narrative: She calls this a “fake establishment narrative” pushed by the media and political class. In the book she makes the claim that “every tax cut is unfunded,” arguing that journalists and officials did not understand economics or monetary policy.
• “Tory traitors”: A chapter titled along these lines accuses figures including Michael Gove, Mel Stride and James Cartlidge of publicly undermining her (in media, Parliament and the 1922 Committee) rather than holding the system to account. She suggests they were motivated by the prospect of jobs under Rishi Sunak and had sided with the institutional status quo (‘The Blob’, again).
• Broader “establishment” or administrative-state resistance: She extends blame to the Treasury, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), unelected bureaucrats, and longer-term institutional arrangements such as Bank of England operational independence (introduced in 1997). She and then-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng are presented as the victims of this resistance and of a media that accepted an official line. In the foreword she addresses critics with a joke that “in this conspiracy, there is no smoke-filled room and secret plan (although I can’t rule it out!).”
• Framing of her short tenure: She writes that the 49 days are used as “proof of folly” but are better seen as “proof of the system’s speed and how close I was to the target.” She continues to defend the mini-budget’s direction.

The book also includes a closing chapter imagining a 2040 Britain under her continued policies: this vision includes no remaining EU laws, a permissive AI regime, Bitcoin treated as money for tax purposes, no central-bank digital currency, lower energy costs and faster planning.

This account is consistent with arguments Truss has made since leaving office (and in her earlier book ‘Ten Years to Save the West’), in which she attributes her fall to an over-mighty administrative state, the Bank, Treasury orthodoxy and “conservatives in name only.”

In short, Truss’s book reframes her resignation as the result of institutional and internal political sabotage that prevented a pro-growth agenda from being tested, rather than as a consequence of the mini-budget’s design and presentation.

At the time of writing, Amazon reviews were completely polarised, positioned either as five star expressions of sympathy for a principled politician whose ambitions were torpedoed by the Deep State, and one star ad hominems rather proving the point she fundamentally makes in her book. ‘The Daily Telegraph’ went one stage further and in a furious personal attack on Truss by Simon Heffer, confirmed that the newspaper’s recent acquisition by Axel Springer has not exactly improved journalistic standards or press ethics in the United Kingdom. As one Telegraph reader archly observed,

“The Fourth Estate is as much to blame for our current woes as any politician.”

We also liked

“At least Truss recognised that Britain was in decline. While arrogant fat hacks working for the Telegraph may have seen improvement in their net income between 2010 and 2024, average disposable household income increased by only 7% in the same period, compared with 38% in the previous 14 years.”

Our own take ?

“’Bank Job’ is a sensation, rightly savaging the Bank of England, the Treasury and the OBR. Liz takes no prisoners but also offers a compelling vision for a better, brighter Britain free of the dead hand of Fabian technocracy. 11/10.”

Given that the world’s bond markets are now revealing just how many western governments have been swimming naked recently (all of them), Liz Truss’ explosive book could not have been better timed. Critics of the Big State and of remote, unaccountable central bank panjandrums will likely love it.

‘Bank Job: a short book on how the Bank of England broke the bond market and brought down the government’ by Liz Truss is now available for purchase via Amazon and elsewhere and is published by Free Speech Press.

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Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.

Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks and real assets, and also in systematic trend-following funds. The fund was “Highly commended” in Investment Week’s 2026 Fund Manager of the Year Awards.