They love the super-rich and want to slash the welfare state: meet the new team at No 10
It’s easy to miss, when you have a prime minister who doesn’t look quite up to the job, how much damage they can do. I made this mistake with Theresa May and Brexit. How could she pull off such a seismic thing, requiring so much persuasion, when she couldn’t even convincingly say hello to a small group of people? Surely all we had to do was wait and the whole thing would implode? I was right in so far as she couldn’t make Brexit happen, but failed to predict how much worse the project would be by the time she had finished trying.
In the spirit of not underestimating Liz Truss, then, let’s take a look at her team: her chief of staff is Mark Fullbrook, interviewed by the FBI about work he did for a Venezuelan-Italian banker accused of bribing the governor of Puerto Rico. (In the interests of fairness, we should spell out that he was spoken to as a potential witness, not a suspect.) A Lynton Crosby acolyte and very longtime Conservative campaigner, Fullbrook is known to have nice manners because that is a thing in Downing Street now. If you don’t scream at people the whole time, you’re the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
There are two policy guys called James Harries and Jamie Hope, both so young that it’s considered impolite to ask where they came from as the answer would be “school”. Special adviser Sophie Jarvis is ex-Adam Smith Institute, director of strategy Iain Carter worked with Crosby and Fullbrook, another spad, Jason Stein, worked for Prince Andrew, and the chief economic adviser, Matthew Sinclair, used to run the TaxPayers’ Alliance pressure group. Vote Leave, the rightwing gossip site Guido Fawkes and the Centre for Policy Studies supply the rest of the background to this vividly zealous, ideologically
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