FORMER UK PRIME Minister Liz Truss has said she was never given a “realistic chance” to implement her radical tax-cutting agenda by her party and by a “powerful economic establishment”.

In her first detailed comments since she was forced out of No 10, Truss said she had not appreciated the strength of the resistance she would face to her plans.

While she acknowledged that she was not “blameless” over the way her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s infamous mini-budget catastrophically unravelled, she still believed her approach to driving growth was the right one.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, she said: “I am not claiming to be blameless in what happened, but fundamentally I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support.

I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted. How wrong I was.

“While I anticipated resistance to my programme from the system, I underestimated the extent of it.

“Similarly, I underestimated the resistance inside the Conservative parliamentary party to move to a lower-tax, less-regulated economy.”

Truss’s brief premiership lasted just 49 days as she was forced to quit after Kwarteng’s £45 billion package of unfunded tax cuts panicked the markets and tanked the pound.

Truss said that while her experience last autumn was “bruising for me personally”, she believed that over the medium term her policies would have increased growth and therefore brought down debt.

However she said she had not been warned of the risks to the bond markets from liability-driven investments (LDIs) – bought up by pension funds – which forced the Bank of England to step in to prevent them collapsing as the cost of government borrowing soared.

In the wake of the mini-budget, she complained that the Government was made a “scapegoat” for developments that had been brewing for some time.

She said that while, with the benefit of hindsight, she would have acted differently, she said that she had had to battle against the “instinctive views of the Treasury” and “the wider orthodox economic ecosystem”.

She said that her and Kwarteng’s plan for growth – with its combination of tax cuts and deregulation to kickstart the stalled economy – had represented a conscious break with the “left-wards” drift of economic thinking, which was resented by some powerful forces.

“Frankly, we were also pushing water uphill. Large parts of the media and the wider public sphere had become unfamiliar with key arguments about tax and economic policy and over time sentiment had shifted left-wards,” she said.

She said the furore over her plan to abolish the top rate of income tax – not least from within her own party – was illustrative of the difficulties she faced.

“Even though the measure was economically sound, I underestimated the political backlash I would face, which focused almost entirely on the ‘optics’,” she said.

In her 4,000 word article, she said she was “deeply disturbed” at having to sack Kwarteng, but believed she had been left with no choice.

“I still believe that seeking to deliver the original policy prescription on which I had fought the leadership election was the right thing to do, but the forces against it were too great.”

While she regretted not being able to implement her plans, she said she had learned a lot from her experience, which she will expand on in the coming months.

“By being bold and entrepreneurial and giving people and businesses the freedom they need to succeed, I believe we can turn things around. There is hope for the future.”

Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves was scathing about Truss’s explanation for the failure of her premiership.

She said: “The Conservatives crashed the economy, sank the pound, put pensions in peril and made working people pay the price through higher mortgages for years to come.

“After 13 years of low growth, squeezed wages and higher taxes under the Tories, only Labour offers the leadership and ideas to fix our economy and to get it growing.”