He caused maximum damage in the shortest possible time and is considered a candidate for the title of "worst finance minister" of the past decades: British Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng. In just 40 days, he caused a nervous breakdown in the financial market, driving the British pound down and mortgage rates and the cost of government bonds up.
Fellow students attested to the elite student Kwasi Kwarteng, he has a great self-confidence. In any case, it helped him to let the self-inflicted chaos drip down to him.
"Minor Disruptions"
On Thursday, however, he was instructed to board the last plane to London to receive the certificate of release from Premier Liz Truss. Yet he was their most loyal enforcer, a close political friend and driven by the same economic policy beliefs as his government leader.
Kwarteng had supported and implemented their plans for comprehensive tax cuts, financed solely by further government debt in the service of nebulous economic growth. Bankers and financial experts had called these schemes unsuitable, economically clueless and even destructive.
Rebellion in the lower house
But it wasn't until the British Conservatives' poll ratings plummeted below 20 percent, the Tory party conference mutated into a rear-end collision and their MPs in the House of Commons called for rebellion that Liz Truss began her about-face. First, she withdrew the cut in the top rate of tax that would have given rich Britons thousands of pounds extra.
DW correspondent Barbara Wesel
In the second step, she put back on the agenda an increase in the corporate tax, which she had previously condemned as anti-growth. The prime minister is fighting for her survival and in the meantime shines in the fast role backwards. Throwing Kwasi Kwarteng under the bus was one of her easier exercises.
The disaster in British politics is ideology-driven, based on Liz Truss's belief in "Reaganomics," an economic and fiscal policy that didn't even work in the 1980s during the time of then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan (1981 to 1989).
Illusion lean state
The idea is that a lean government with low public spending could automatically generate growth through massive tax cuts. Thereby it is accepted that this policy makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Economists all over the world have long since condemned this ideology. In the face of rising inflation rates and a global energy crisis, these prescriptions even apply guidance for economic disaster.
Yet Liz Truss remains unshaken in her promise that she can somehow make the economic pie bigger. In fact, something like this takes years and requires comprehensive social reforms. But there is no sign of that in the UK, with rising poverty, a failing school system and a collapsing healthcare system.
After firing her treasury secretary, Liz Truss simply acknowledged her financial and fiscal policies had "moved too fast". It has learned nothing from previous calamities and is hoping that financial markets will calm down and its government will regain destroyed credibility.
Truss struggles to survive
But how is that supposed to work, when all she did was kick out a man who implemented her policy exactly? In the House of Commons, Conservative MPs are rehearsing the rebellion and considering whether they could replace Truss with a new prime minister as early as next week in a coup d'etat.
This would finally turn the UK into a kind of banana republic, where a new government is flushed into office every few months by coup, coup d'etat or palace intrigue. In any democracy, now would be the time for urgent new elections.
But the parliamentary majority wants to prevent new elections at all costs. Because that would mean the Conservatives would be banned from government for years to come. Voter anger is now so great that the credibility of the Tories has been lost.
Because new elections would cause dozens of MPs to lose their offices, the death spiral of British politics will continue for a while, adding a new series to the Downing Street continuation drama along the lines of: more in this theater soon.