The moment Liz Truss heard about the imminent death of the Queen, the one person by her side to assess the immediate implications — Nick Catsaras, the new principal private secretary — was a figure few people even in Whitehall would recognise. Add his arrival to a chief of staff, Mark Fullbrook, a product of the diehard Lynton Crosby training ground for Tory election campaigners, and the message is clear: team Truss looks markedly unlike the Friends of Boris (FOB) clique who presided over his rollercoaster stay at No10. It is, as one insider puts it “like a new term at a new school — you recognise one or two people from the previous place, but mainly it is newbies, still having to borrow chargers and fighting for a desk that is not behind a door”.
The upheaval is a sign of Truss’s determination to signal that the country is under new management. That was driven home by installing Kwasi Kwarteng as a bullish chancellor whose first “mini-Budget” was in fact a major fiscal intervention. The markets wobbled, the pound took a pasting and the cost of borrowing soared. But whether or not this all proves to be an omen of worse things to come or a blip while investors get used to a nail-biting economic recipe intended to spur a quick return to higher growth, no one around Truss can claim they didn’t know the risks of a rollercoaster journey.
