Was IMF attack over sacking of Sir Humphrey?

A‘large and untargeted fiscal package’ was the scathing verdict of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget last week: an extraordinary intervention from a body normally charged with rescuing basket-case economies in latin america.

Ministers were furious. and sources tell me there is a strong suspicion among senior government figures that allies of the ousted Treasury mandarin Sir Tom Scholar might have had something to do with it.

One of Kwarteng’s first acts as Chancellor was to sack Scholar, the Permanent Secretary at the Treasury since 2016.

an arch- remainer who previously served as David Cameron’s ‘adviser for europe’, Scholar epitomised the stuffy economic orthodoxy that Kwarteng and liz Truss are seeking to overthrow.

But, says my Treasury mole, his defenestration enraged Whitehall: ‘Scholar still has a big cadre of supporters. The IMF attack reeked of their revenge.’

lord Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, agrees.

‘I would not be surprised to learn that friends of Sir Tom Scholar . . . have been expressing their dismay to their friends in the IMF’s headquarters in Washington,’ he said last week.

IMF managing director Kristalina georgieva — who served as vice-president of the european Commission — has remained notably silent in the wake of what lord Moore called the organisation’s ‘deliberately unfriendly’ statement.