Kwasi Kwarteng has discovered that friendships don’t count in politics

It is a remarkably quick end to a partnership between a pair who vowed to always be ‘in lockstep’, writes Andrew Grice

They even live near other in Greenwich, London (PA)

Kwasi Kwarteng has discovered that friendships don’t count in politics. Liz Truss has unceremoniously sacked her chancellor after 38 days in the job, even though the two ideological soulmates have been close allies since entering the Commons in 2010. They even live near other in Greenwich, London.

It is a remarkably quick end to a partnership between a pair who vowed to always be “in lockstep” like David Cameron and George Osborne and never at daggers drawn like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Yet tensions between them have grown since last month’s mini-Budget. It was Truss rather than Kwarteng who ditched its announcement that the 45p top rate of income tax would be scrapped.

Similarly, Number 10 has driven the filleting of large parts of the remaining £43bn of tax cuts, including Kwarteng’s decision to ditch Rishi Sunak’s proposed rise in corporation tax from 19 per cent to 25 per cent next April.

Even before the chancellor arrived back in Downing Street after cutting short by a day his attendance at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting in Washington, reports emerged that Truss was about to sack him.

Truss will doubtless invoke The Godfather and tell Kwarteng that, “it’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” Yet her dramatic move will rightly be seen as a desperate attempt to save her premiership, a sign she will be “whatever it takes” to cling on to it.

As rumours swirled around Westminster on Thursday that Truss was filleting Kwarteng’s mini-Budget while he was in Washington, it seemed that events could hardly get any more dramatic. Then they did. A government insider whispered to me to that the prime minister was thinking about another cunning plan to save her job – a cabinet reshuffle.

At first, I couldn’t believe it. Just five weeks into her premiership, surely a panicky reshuffle would be seen as another sign of her government imploding before our eyes. Yet it makes sense now she has fired Kwarteng and there are other reasons why a wider reshuffle might appeal to Truss.

She desperately needs to get her panicky, rebellious Tory MPs onside. Many are demanding a new chief whip. To say they are unimpressed with Truss’s choice of Wendy Morton, a supporter of her leadership campaign, is one of the understatements of the century. When the incoming prime minister handed her the task of breaking the bad news to MPs that there was “no room” to make them a minister, Morton added to their disappointment by reading out a pre-prepared statement.

Although the writing appears to be on the wall for Morton, Truss is being urged by Therese Coffey, the deputy prime minister, not to dismiss her.

Allies of Rishi Sunak want some of his supporters brought into cabinet jobs to correct Truss’s woeful misjudgement in excluding them when she named her original team. This became an act of self-harm; Sunak allies, feeling that they owed her no loyalty, made trouble for Truss at the Tory conference and when the Commons returned this week. Truss could and should redress the balance.

A wider reshuffle would also suit Truss in another sense: she could make clear one reason is to install the cabinet discipline so obviously lacking so far. Her hope would be that it would be a reset for the way her government operates. Remarkably, Whitehall whispers even suggest that Suella Braverman could be dismissed as home secretary for openly defying Truss on several policy issues. Braverman has opposed the PM’s plan to relax immigration to allow more foreign workers to fill skill shortages, prompting an attempt by Downing Street to sideline her.

She has stated her preference for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which is not government policy. She was slapped down by Number 10 after suggesting that cannabis should become a class A drug.

For good measure, the home secretary is being blamed for scuppering the early agreement of a trade deal with India after saying that Indians with visas are the worst over-stayers in the UK, which angered the Indian government. Truss was also irritated that Braverman regretted her U-turn on scrapping the 45p top rate of income tax and accused Michael Gove of mounting a “coup” on the issue.

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Truss allies believe Braverman, who ran for the leadership this summer before backing Truss, is playing to the Tory gallery because she intends to stand in a future contest. This, of course, is hardly a vote of confidence in the new PM, and further weakens Truss’s already diminishing authority.

However, as many prime ministers before Truss have discovered, a reshuffle is not a silver bullet. Dismissing Kwarteng might not save Truss’s skin, if Tory MPs judge he should not be made the scapegoat for implementing the policies on which she won the Tory leadership. Her desperate act also begs the question: if she cannot bring in her low-tax, high-growth agenda, what is the point of her?

Tory MPs may yet decide to have a very different reshuffle and force yet another PM out of their job.