Live updates: UK PM Liz Truss sacks Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng

Spare a thought for the British Conservative MPs.

Britain’s ruling party thought it had a hard time with scandal-hit Boris Johnson wrecking their polls and turning what was once called the natural party of government into an explosive clown car.

But after expending enormous energy to remove a reluctant Johnson from office this summer, exhausted MPs say his replacement, Liz Truss – just 37 days after taking office – seems determined to make the situation worse.

After his mini-budget – which offered unfunded tax cuts, huge government borrowing and let energy companies escape a windfall tax – sent the pound plummeting and caused all sorts of wider economic chaos, they are faced with the grim reality of having a leader they deemed more damaging than Johnson but will be even harder to replace.

« Even if you think she’s awful, we can’t replace her so soon, » a former cabinet minister and Truss supporter told CNN. « I’m not optimistic about the future, but we have to try to overcome this and learn from mistakes. »

The mistakes in question were, most members would agree, terrible communications from the government and trying to do too much too quickly without being adequately funded.

“They pledged huge spending, rightly so, to help people pay their energy bills, and then immediately started talking about tax cuts,” a senior Tory official said. As a result, they “don’t even get credit for spending a lot of money. When you announce a policy like this, you have to roll the pitch like crazy. Why didn’t they roll the pitch?

Truss could be forced to turn around on Friday and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, is fighting to save her job.

Read more about the Conservative Party’s bad mood here.