Game Over?

On Truss’s second day in office I wrote about her cabinet and adviser picks:

“The downside…of such a tight team, and a cabinet picked on loyalty, is that there will be little diversity of opinion or challenge, which could exacerbate Truss’s dogmatic tendencies. Her advisers and senior ministers are all alums of the same group of right-wing think-tanks – the IEA, Taxpayers Alliance, and Adam Smith Institute. There is a poetic irony in their first big announcement being a massive state intervention to fix energy prices. The question is whether it’s a one off or shows they have the ideological flexibility to govern successfully.”

We got the answer to that last Friday as Kwasi Kwarteng reeled off a list of increasingly unnecessary tax cuts without bothering to indicate how they might be paid for. Even that, as I wrote last weekend, looked risky but salvageable. The markets, and Tory MPs, reacted badly, but some calming briefing to the Sunday papers could, perhaps, have kept things under control. Instead, for reasons known only to them, they decided to launch into the stupidest briefing round in history – telling journalists that they were planning yet more tax cuts for the rich.

We’ve all seen the carnage this has caused. The Bank of England have now had to intervene to restore some stability to the markets; but the political damage is irreparable and will only get worse as the economic consequences for voters become more and more apparent. We’ve already seen a 17% Labour lead from YouGov, the biggest from any pollster in 20 years. It’s hard to believe it won’t grow, given it was taken at the weekend, before interventions from the Bank and the IMF. Another YouGov poll published yesterday found twice as many people backing Labour to grow the economy than the Tories, a result last seen in the aftermath of Black Wednesday. At the weekend I said there might still be a narrow path to an election victory, if the Government got lucky and showed better judgement. Well they didn’t and they haven’t so their chances of a win can now only be detected by CERN. Tory MPs are describing it as an extinction level event.