Britain’s new finance secretary warned of looming tax hikes on Saturday as he admitted “mistakes” made in a disastrous budget that still threatens to oust Prime Minister Liz Truss.

“Truss fighting for survival,” headlined The Times newspaper a day after forcing Treasury Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng to carry the can for market turmoil sparked by her Sept. 23 budget.

The Times, Telegraph and other newspapers reported that senior Conservative MPs were still planning to oust Truss potentially within days, horrified by the party’s collapse in opinion polls since replacing Boris Johnson on September 6.

The new Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, hinted that he would turn the strategy that brought Truss to 10 Downing Street on its head.

“There were mistakes,” admitted Hunt, a former foreign secretary who is seen as a Tory centrist.

He said Kwarteng and Truss got it wrong when they tried to cut taxes on the highest earners and presented their budget without independent forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility.

“The Prime Minister recognized that, that’s why I’m here,” Hunt told Sky News.

In one of his first acts late Friday, the new minister spoke to Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, who has had to implement costly interventions to calm feverish bond markets.

“They discussed the importance of fighting global inflation and their commitment to economic growth and fiscal discipline,” the Treasury Department tweeted.

Tax cuts were at the heart of the ill-starred budget announced by Kwarteng and Truss.

But they have been funded by billions of dollars in further borrowing, sparking a panic in financial markets that has resulted in higher costs for UK households amid a cost-of-living crisis.

“We’re going to have some very tough decisions ahead of us,” Hunt said, warning that “all government departments” face spending constraints.

“And some taxes aren’t going down as fast as people want. Some taxes are going to go up.”

Hunt confirmed he would be making a fresh financial statement on October 31 and told BBC radio he had a “clean slate” to start over – stressing that Truss had significantly weakened her own position after she stepped up a stubborn reform platform came to power.

Truss fired Kwarteng hours after rushing home early from international financial meetings in Washington, and staged another about-face by agreeing to a substantial increase in corporate profit taxes.

At a subsequent press conference in Downing Street, her first since Johnson succeeded her, the Prime Minister gave a widely panned performance that failed to calm market nerves.

Truss answered only four questions, nervously looking around the room and giving terse answers.

She insisted she acted “decisively” in sacking Kwarteng to bring about “economic stability” – but sterling continued to slide in currency markets and UK bond markets faltered again.

When asked why she shouldn’t step down herself, Truss said she was “absolutely committed to delivering on what I promised.”

But after Truss abandoned the right-wing economic promises that got her elected Conservative leader against rival Rishi Sunak, she has faced mounting criticism that her political credibility is in tatters.

“I feel disappointed, very badly disappointed,” Christopher Chope, a Tory MP and Truss loyalist, told BBC television.

Truss’ actions on Friday were “completely inconsistent with everything the prime minister stood for when she was elected,” he complained.

Former Conservative Party leader William Hague said Truss’s premiership now “hangs by a thread”, while ex-Chancellor Philip Hammond said she had “wasted years and years of painstaking work” to break the party’s record for economic literacy to set up.

But with the opposition Labor Party soaring in the polls, Welsh Minister Robert Buckland warned his recalcitrant colleagues against another coup so soon after they ousted Johnson.

“I think if we start with gay devotion and throw another prime minister to the wolves, we’re going to face more delays, more debate and more instability,” he told BBC radio.