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Former Prime Minister Liz Truss has attacked Andy Burnham for going on Gogglebox instead of talking about the economy. She also suggested it was not her mini-budget that “went wrong” while appearing on Sky News on Tuesday morning. The former Tory leader was adamant that most of the blame for the fall-out from her time in government was the Bank of England and the civil servants in the Treasury. Defending her Budget from four years ago, she said: “It wasn’t the mini budget that went wrong.

“I think this is very important. What was there was a spike in the gilt market. That’s what led to the chain of events that ultimately led to my resignation.” Her September 2022 mini-budget included £45 billion in tax cuts which were blamed for financial market panic. Ms Truss also hit out at the Prime Minister’s appearance on Channel 4’s Gogglebox.

In the episode, Mr Burnham is filmed drinking a pint of beer and sitting alongside his close friend Liverpool City Region Mayor Steve Rotheram on a sofa where he counted a series of numbers while trying to guess one of the puzzles.

Ms Truss said: “So you’ve got a institutional set which believes in these progressive policies that haven’t worked, and you’ve got a political class and a political discussion that wants to talk about Googlebox or Gogglebox, is it doesn’t want to talk about what is actually going on in the economy. I find that very depressing.”

The Government on Tuesday announced a series of “everyday fixes” to help people with the cost-of-living crisis, that are expected to feature in Wednesday’s Budget.

But speaking on the eve of Chancellor John Healey’s maiden Budget, Ms Truss added: “We have a system now in Britain that doesn’t work. We have a Bank of England that is divorced from the political process that essentially decides monetary policy and through that decides fiscal policy. In fact, recently the government attacked the Bank of England for interfering in fiscal policy. You’ve also got the OBR, which is an arm’s length forecasting body. It does mean the Chancellor is not able to really direct his ideas about the impact the budget will have.”

Ms Truss added: “We have this absurd notion of headroom and the public would assume that headroom meant there was a gap between what we have coming in and what we have going out. No, this is a gap in five years time of what we might need to do to get the debt falling. So we’re still massively in debt. We still are running a deficit every year. And the way that we talk about economics, the way the structures work, make it very difficult, I believe, for a chancellor to actually change things.”