To grasp the scale of our national fragility, you have only to cast your eye across the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report. The basic reality, there in black and white, is as confounding as it is worrying: we are now set to continue to get poorer even as the economy gets bigger, while rising taxes will not fund more spending on public services.

At first glance this doesn’t make sense, but the reasons are simple. The economy will only get bigger because there will be a lot more people in it, rather than because we, as individuals, are getting richer. The OBR’s forecast for the overall size of the economy remained virtually unchanged from last time. Yet it revised down its expectations of GDP per person. In fact, from 2022 we have been getting poorer — a situation which will only start to change from the second half of this year.

But perhaps the most crucial line of all was this: “Economic and market conditions mean the Government needs to run a primary surplus… of around 1.3% of GDP just to stabilise debt in the medium term.” By comparison, the OBR went on, in the 2010s, “debt could be stabilised while running a primary deficit of 2.1%”. In other words, we now get less for more, literally.

To illustrate the point, take these figures: taxes as a share of GDP will rise to 37.1% in 2028-29, four points up on what they were before the pandemic. But spending will fall “steadily” as a share of GDP from 44.5% this year to 42.5% in 2028-29. All the while, national debt will rise. Put bluntly, the size of our debt — and the scale of the interest we are paying on it — means we are now much poorer than we used to be. And this is before we consider the economic burden caused by our ageing population and the crisis in Ukraine leeching more money for defence.

And so, facing this reality, even though we are just a matter of months away from the next election, Hunt had barely any room for manoeuvre. The 2p cut from national insurance and the increase in the threshold at which child benefit is removed eased the tax burden on middle-class workers, the voters the Conservative Party will need if it is to stand any chance of avoiding a wipeout whenever the election is called. But even these tweaks around the edges of the tax system required such fanciful assumptions as to be essentially worthless as a meaningful forecast.

To illustrate the point, the OBR states — with damning understatement — that the fiscal forecast is conditioned on the tax take “rising to near record highs, including through planned rises in fuel duty that have not, in practice, been implemented since 2011”. It adds that Hunt’s budget “also assumes the Government will stick to assumptions which imply no real growth in public spending per person over the next five years, despite committing to increase spending on some major public services in line with or faster than GDP.” In other words, get real.

As a result, the Government has essentially spent as much as it possibly could — leaving just £8.9 billion in “headroom”, as the jargon has it, which the OBR points out is historically small — and, perhaps worst of all, decided to put its head in the sand and avoid conducting any detailed department-by-department spending plans beyond 2024-25 because, well, because that would reveal what such a squeeze on spending actually means.

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Because of this small margin of error baked into Hunt’s sums, or what the OBR calls “the risks around that central forecast”, Britain is suddenly more exposed to events beyond our control which could blow up the Government’s plans at any moment. “Inflation could rebound and remain higher for longer if the conflict in the Middle East were to widen,” the OBR warns, “or if domestic wage pressures do not subside as quickly as we assume.” Immigration might not prove to be as high as currently forecast, meaning a smaller economy and fewer people to tax while the hoped-for increases in productivity might not materialise either. And most important, perhaps, “the fiscal forecast is highly sensitive to movements in interest rates which have been unusually volatile recently”. Because we are now so indebted, we are at the mercy of those we are borrowing from. The Government, in other words, is flying close to the sun, hoping its assumptions pan out because we can no longer afford to be more prudent.

T.E. Utley captured a similar mood at the fag end of a previous period of Tory rule in 1963, when he bemoaned the sense of drift and purposeless that seemed to have taken over the government. “The prevailing impression of Conservative policy over the last 11 years is one of extreme incoherence,” Utley wrote. “Essentially, we remain in much the same position as we were in 1951.” The same is true today, only worse.

By the time the Tories took power 13 years ago, the economic consensus that had been in place from 1992 — outside the Euro but inside the EU, with low debts and steady growth based on an ever larger financial services sector and booming house prices — had already blown apart. In the years that have followed, we have tried at least three different strategies to replace that old model. First George Osborne bet the house on resurrecting an export-led model of growth with an even more globalised City of London acting as China’s banker to the world. When this failed, Theresa May and Boris Johnson tried different versions of Big State Toryism to increase prosperity outside of the South East of England. When they fell, Liz Truss tried shock therapy only to spark a crisis which saw her kicked from office. Finally, we have Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt who have been left with an ever-decreasing set of options for how to pull the country out of its predicament.

Our grim reality today is that we have no money — and no strategy either. Good luck, Keir Starmer.

Today’s financial rules often seem designed to maximise inconvenience for individuals carrying out small transactions. Despite the stupendous number of business regulations, however, the big events often seem to be missed. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the bank of choice for large numbers of tech companies, is just the latest to surprise us.

On Saturday, more than 200 UK tech companies, worth £3.5 billion in venture funding, riled themselves up into a state of panic. They wrote an open letter to the Chancellor warning that they now face an “existential threat”, and suggested that the Bank of England’s attempts to downplay its impact showed “a dangerous lack of understanding of the sector and the role it plays in the broader economy”.

The truth, however, is that shocks like this are inherently difficult to predict. Indeed, it is more or less impossible, unless the central regulator is omniscient. The losses which have caused SVB’s collapse, for instance, seem to have arisen from the bank making complicated bets on interest rates and getting them wrong. It’s easy enough to explain after the event — but it’s very hard to anticipate.

And so Lenin’s maxim springs to mind: it’s better to have a few bright minds capable of thinking outside the box about the resilience of a system than legions of box tickers designing myriad rules which purportedly eliminate risk.

A similar issue confronts Rishi Sunak ahead of his first Budget tomorrow. Apart from the SVB crisis, two financial developments haunt his financial programme. They are both bad — and they both stem from a misguided attempt by regulators to control risk.

The first is contained in the sudden rush of UK companies deciding to quit the London Stock Exchange for Wall Street. ARM, for example, which is based in Cambridge and describes itself as the R&D department for the global semiconductor industry, has decided to place its forthcoming IPO, expected to be valued at some $40 billion, in New York. CRH, the world’s largest building material supplier, is also moving its listing from the UK to the US.

The second concerns recent warnings by pension funds that they face massive losses. Despite the surge in equity values in the stock market, drops of more than 20% are being recorded in funds managed by top outfits such as Aviva. The Retirement Protection Pension Fund of Clerical Medical (part of Lloyds Banking Group) has managed to lose 38.7% of its money in the past 12 months.

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The culprit, particularly in the second case, is the burdensome Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID2). The directive requires investment firms, which includes pension providers, to collect a huge amount of information from their clients, ranging from their preferences on sustainability to their “risk tolerance”. There are many boxes to tick and many forms to fill in; according to Forbes, the MiFID2 regulations contain 1.5 million paragraphs. This sums up the approach of our regulators, who appear to believe that the solution to everything is to write yet more paragraphs. Such behaviour fosters the illusion of control. But it is just that: an illusion. And the outcome has been disastrous for many pensioners.

As individuals move into their 50s, their pension providers are encouraged by the regulations to implement a so-called “lifestyle” investment approach. Their funds are gradually moved from what the regulator deemed to be risky investments, namely equities, to government bonds, designated as safe assets. These bonds are indeed safe in one sense of the word: since the Bank of England was created well over 300 years ago, British governments have never defaulted on their loans.

But their market value is highly sensitive to changes in interest rates. Rates were held artificially low by central banks throughout the 2010s following the financial crisis, but they started to rise last year, even before the turmoil of the short-lived Truss government pushed them up to 4%. And if there is one fundamental principle behind the pricing of bonds, it’s that if interest rates rise, the value of bonds goes down. As a result, pensioners have been left with big capital losses on their portfolios — and all because of a collapse in the values of an asset class which regulators deemed to be “safe”.

The problems of the London Stock Exchange arise from several factors, but the MiFID2 regulations are at their centre. As a result of their risk-averse approach, pension funds have been allocating far less of their assets to shares in companies (equities). According to recent estimates, just 27% of UK pension fund allocation is in equities, compared to more than 50% in the US. And it is equities which are the real lifeblood of any stock exchange; little wonder that firms are defecting to what is now a much bigger market.

Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt will have to contend with this core problem of overregulation if they are to fulfil their desire of Britain becoming “the next Silicon Valley”. Sunak has placed investment and innovation at the centre of his government’s policies. But despite a proliferation of schemes designed to encourage corporate investment over the years, UK levels remain persistently low. According to the OECD in 2021, for example, capital spending in Britain was only 17% of GDP, compared to a developed country average of 22%. In Europe, only Greece was lower among OECD members. And by all accounts, the Chancellor is very likely to persist with the planned increase in corporation tax.

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Yet the causal connection between taxation and investment is very well established, as Phillipe Aghion’s 2021 book by The Power of Creative Destruction makes clear. Aghion and colleagues cite a paper in the top-ranked American Economic Review which finds that a 1% increase in the top rate of corporation tax leads to a 6% drop in the number of patents and a 5% fall in the number of inventors. The point here is not a case for finely tuning the exact detail of a taxation regime: it simply has to offer suitable incentives to innovators and inventors.

To be fair to Sunak, he has backed up his words with deeds. Last week, along with the Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan, he launched the first major piece of work from the newly created Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. While some of it does seem to be a re-hash of existing policies, the document recognises that different methods of funding science and innovation need to be tested. After all, a major problem with research councils is that it is very hard to get “left-field” projects financed. These are ones with a very high risk of failure, but which really push the frontiers of knowledge when they succeed. It is much less risky, however, to finance “safe” proposals, which simply add incrementally to knowledge and whose results are essentially known in advance.

Sunak and Donelan propose that institutions known as Focused Research Organisations are tested. Essentially, these are not-for-profit start-ups which are too big for a single academic lab to do and which are too complex for a loose, multi-lab collaboration. The crucial feature of the document is not any particular detail or policy, but Sunak’s apparent understanding of the importance of “try and test”. This holds that, rather than specify in great detail a structure which is predicted to give good results, it is better in an evolutionary environment to try something in practice. If it works, you can then reinforce it. If it doesn’t, you can drop it and try something else.

As for the SVB crisis, the UK’s flexible and speedy response has been equally encouraging. A crisis broke — and rather than form a committee to try and work out the perfect response, the Government acted. A wide range of options was reportedly considered, and the problem was swiftly solved over the weekend by HSBC taking over SVB’s UK arm for just £1.

Sunak, then, unlike his immediate predecessors, appears to understand the complex, inherently unpredictable nature of the modern world. It is a world where agility, flexibility and swift decision-making are the necessary qualities; where a “better fewer” approach is crucial; and where documents with 1.5 million paragraphs are at least 1.49 million paragraphs too long.

As two of the key preliminary hearings in the UK Covid Inquiry take place this week — two years after Boris Johnson said “we owe it to the country to produce answers in a reasonable timescale” — bereaved families and policy sceptics could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is an excuse to kick controversies and failings into the long grass. Will this inquiry follow the pattern of previous ones and avoid the difficult questions?

There are already concerns. With the World Health Organization refusing to provide a statement of evidence, not all the relevant stakeholders are engaging with the process, while bereaved families already feel marginalised. But the Inquiry’s broad Terms Of Reference (TOR) are encouraging: decision-making, the availability and use of data, “legislative and regulatory control and enforcement”, “the use of lockdowns and other ‘non-pharmaceutical’ interventions (NPIs)”, the impact on mental health of the whole population, the specific impacts on young people and education, and the safeguarding of public funds are all included. As are questions of the treatment of Covid-19 in hospitals, care homes, and “the development, delivery and impact of therapeutics and vaccines”, alongside the consequences of the pandemic on provision of non-Covid treatments.

But how will the Inquiry address these issues? Will it simply reinforce the mainstream public and Government messaging — or will it provide a meaningful examination of this peacetime catastrophe? Given the current narrative regarding the most controversial of pandemic measures, “the use of lockdowns and other [NPIs]”, one might perhaps be allowed a little scepticism. That the UK failed to lock down soon enough is pretty much orthodoxy in policy circles. This was the conclusion in October 2021 of the Health and Social Affairs Select Committee, soon repeated by luminaries such as Jeremy Hunt — and trumpeted by Keir Starmer as early as April 2020.

A serious inquiry shouldn’t simply repeat the mantra — it should consider the novelty of the lockdown model (the WHO’s November 2019 pandemic preparedness report into NPIs did not mention the word “lockdown” once), as well as its long-term effectiveness. The TOR encourage the “reasonable regard of relevant international comparisons”, and it’s to be hoped that this is taken seriously. Italy’s national lockdown was the first in world history —  and yet it has one of Western Europe’s highest Covid death rates. South Africa’s was the strictest lockdown in Africa, and yet it has far and away the highest Covid death rate on the continent. Peru had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in 2020, and now has the world’s highest Covid fatality rate.

So this inquiry should seek to understand how and why the world’s political and scientific establishment cohered around a completely untried and untested model for dealing with the Covid outbreak. It should attempt to connect this to some of the other themes in the TOR, especially the question of political decision-making, such as how and why did the UK’s scientific establishment depart from the previous consensus that, as the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said on March 13, 2020, “If you completely locked down absolutely everything, probably for a period of four months or more then you would suppress this virus… but when you do that and then you release it, it all comes back again.”

And it should seek to interrogate how and why the lockdown approach became unchallengeable, leading to a situation in which 40% of the deaths from Covid-19 in the Western world took place in the most vulnerable of all settings — care homes. Why did the Imperial College modellers’ predictions that the lockdown measures would see fewer than 6,000 people dying from Covid in the UK overestimate the effectiveness of these measures by something like 3,000%? And why was the UK’s pre-2020 pandemic planning — which emphasised balancing the costs and benefits of all interventions according to the principles of proportionality and flexibility, minimising the disruptions to everyday social and economic life, and protecting the vulnerable — thrown out of the window?

This core question should be connected to the broader impact on healthcare. Instead of protecting the NHS, did lockdowns produce the crisis we now see flooding the health service? Should more care have been focused on the vulnerable, while allowing the rest of society to continue as normal? Would this have then mitigated the damaging effects of lockdown on young people and societal mental health, as well as avoiding the immensely regressive consequences of school closures?

Although the effects of lockdown should lie at the heart of the Inquiry, there are other aspects of the pandemic which deserve scrutiny.

Why, for example, did the Government ignore the potential benefits of natural immunity, when evidence suggested early on that prior infection confers durable protective immunity in the case of SARS-CoV2, as confirmed by a study just published in The Lancet? The idea of letting the virus spread through those who were at low risk from it (the overwhelming majority of the population), allowing them to generate antibodies, while protecting high-risk groups, was a well-established epidemiological concept, and yet it was dismissed as outlandish, despite being initially advocated by Patrick Vallance.

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Why, too, was compulsory universal masking adopted, despite the fact that no existing data supported the use of face-masking in the general population as a protective measure against respiratory viruses? Even the WHO had originally stated that “the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks” — including lulling elderly and at-risk people into a false sense of security by making them mistakenly believe they will be safe while wearing them. This has now been confirmed by meta-analysis published in January by Cochrane, widely considered the gold standard of healthcare data review. And what was the point in the use of mass testing for the general population, including in very low-risk children, at a massive cost, without evidence of individual or community-wide benefit from doing so?

The question of treatment is often ignored in the heated exchanges around Covid, but it also deserves serious examination. Why was so little research conducted into early at-home treatments for Covid? Based on existing drugs, these had apparently early benefits in reducing hospitalisations and deaths — which were subsequently confirmed in peer-reviewed studies (see here and here) — as early as March 2020. They were ignored, though, even after the publication of a first early treatment protocol based on efficacy and safety in the prestigious American Journal of Medicine in July 2020.

The potential of a number of early treatments was relatively unexplored, even though they might have worked well to prevent infection and illness. Instead, how many people ended up in hospital because all they were told, at the onset of the first symptoms, was to stay at home, rest, and in the case of a high fever to take paracetamol? And then, once they were in hospital, how many of those who developed serious respiratory issues perished because they were placed on mechanical ventilators? During the first wave, this became the mainstay of treatment for severe and critical cases of Covid-19; however, it soon become clear that a shockingly high number of patients put on ventilators ended up dying. It would later emerge that the use of pressurised oxygen was literally destroying patients’ lung sacs that were inflamed and damaged by the virus, and therefore unable to withstand the high pressure of mechanical ventilators. Why was the ventilation protocol maintained for months despite such appalling results?

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Finally, why were fast-tracked, experimental, and, ultimately, little-known “next-generation” mRNA technology-based vaccines offered to everyone, including those at little risk from Covid, even though it was known that the vaccines didn’t prevent transmission, and were associated with serious side effects? Wouldn’t a focused, risk-based approach to vaccination have been more advisable?

There are serious questions to be asked about the management of this catastrophe. The scope of the inquiry is necessarily huge. But the politicisation of the debate around Covid is fraught. There are strong headwinds, built up during the initial years when the lockdown consensus was so powerful. But as the failings of the Covid policy response become ever clearer, let’s hope the the British public isn’t lumbered with yet another meaningless inquiry.

“You do not need to choose either a strong economy or good public services. With the Conservatives, and only with the Conservatives, you get both,” Hunt told the Commons, with a straight face. As he well knows, public services are buckling under the strain of a decade of austerity. Meanwhile, the OBR expects our weak economic growth to facilitate the cratering of household disposable incomes by the largest amount since records began in the mid-Fifties, yanking them back to where they were nearly 10 years ago.

In another life, Hunt was the longest-serving Health Secretary in history, who hung on in post against Theresa May’s wishes until he received a £20 billion additional “birthday present” spending commitment for the NHS. Now that Hunt is on the other side of the negotiating table, holding the purse strings, there will be no such profligate gift-giving.

“This government has forced our economy into a doom loop where low growth leads to higher taxes, lower investment and squeezed wages, with a running down of public services — all of which hits economic growth again,” Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves replied. Her diagnosis is absolutely correct — atrophy of growth has led to necrosis of public services. Hunt may claim that the Tories offer both a strong economy and public services, but they self-evidently offer neither.

For a statement that mentioned the word “growth” 28 times, Hunt’s plan to achieve it was remarkably unambitious and involved little self-reflection, citing energy, infrastructure and innovation as his three priorities. This is a huge red flag. While these matter, they pale in comparison to the economic damage wrought by a planning system that prevents the building of homes in our most productive regions, thereby strangling the supply of ambitious, productive workers to productive jobs and businesses.

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Not that this should be a surprise; this outlook mirrors that of his boss, Rishi Sunak, who said earlier this year, in a lecture on growth, that growth required merely “a new culture of enterprise”, leaving supply-side reforms to planning and housing unmentioned. Those reforms might be worth upwards of 30% of GDP — but why trouble yourself with that? While Hunt paid lip service to the motivations of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous September mini-budget, if he is not prepared to take on what Truss rightly identified as the anti-growth coalition, he will surely fail in his mission to make Britain a better country. The supply-side baby must not be thrown out with the unfunded tax cuts bathwater.

It’s easy to blame our economic and fiscal headwinds on the mini-budget. But the seeds of this crisis were sown long before Truss and Kwarteng drove a truckload of fertiliser to the farm to encourage growth, only to accidentally blow it up before it reached the fields.

Reputation for economic competence is built over decades, but can be lost in minutes. And the Conservative Party is now finding out how it feels to have an economic narrative set up by their opponents. Much as Labour was blamed for the financial crisis by the Tories, despite its global nature, the Conservatives are being painted by their opponents as being responsible for rising interest rates, the increase in the cost of living ,and the impact of the recession we’ve just entered.

“At the very least, he could have offered an apology but, no, instead he says his predecessor was correct in his analysis at the mini-Budget that put our economy into free fall,” Reeves taunted from the Opposition despatch box. But none of the pain we are going through has its origin in Kwarteng’s mini-budget. While it certainly didn’t help things, as soaring government gilt yields showed, most of Kwarteng’s economic, if not political, impact was essentially wiped clean by Hunt’s scrapping of almost all the mini-budget measures. The cost of government borrowing is back to where it was before that touchpaper was lit.

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Rather, the war in Ukraine and the resultant sanctions and European diversification from Russian gas are a far larger source of inflation than those now-reversed spending commitments. We are also still wading through the backwash of the inflationary monetary and fiscal stimuli introduced to combat Covid-19, which unleashed unintended inflation. Supply chains are also still being disrupted by the pandemic, increasing the cost of services and manufactured goods — goods which are even harder to source given the ongoing lockdowns in China that are holding back the Chinese economy.

Sailors famously do not choose the weather, but they can choose not to sail straight into the storm. And this is precisely what the Conservative Party has done. By building a political economy that relies on the votes of the anti-growth coalition of home-owning pensioners, it finds itself unable to reform the economy to deliver either growth or public servicesit finds itself unable to reform the economy to deliver either growth or public services — public services that same coalition of elderly voters is becoming increasingly reliant on as health and social care needs rise with age, leaving them ever more disgruntled.

These increasingly bitter choices, worsening living standards and dilapidated public services are the price we pay for actively choosing to reject economic growth. “Anyone who says there are easy answers is not being straight with the British people,” Hunt said yesterday. Economically, the answer is very easy — take your foot off the brake by building. But politically, Hunt is right: the challenge is totemic.

William Hague said of the euro that it represented a “burning building with no exit”. Well, our burning building has exits. We could choose to build more, and stop placating the anti-growth coalition — but we would have to walk through the fire to do so. Does the Conservative party have the stomach for it? Of course not. If you needed an indication of how likely the party is to face down its elderly voters, the triple lock on pensions was maintained in this Autumn Statement. Pensions will grow with inflation, while workers suffer real-terms pay cuts. And we wonder why there’s no growth. ‘Twas ever thus.

If Hunt fails to address these, he knows what will happen. The fate of his immediate predecessor still looms large; it’s not even two months since Kwasi Kwarteng made his September statement, a moment that will go down as one of the biggest political calamities in history. The fallout showed clearly that the country’s creditors will not support unbalanced books — and this makes Hunt’s job infinitely trickier.

For all the failings of Truss and Kwarteng’s short reign, their fundamental diagnosis was right: the British economy had been too lethargic for too long. It is an inescapable fact that GDP and real-term wage growth have never recovered their pre-Financial Crisis trajectory. Both as a nation and as individuals, we are much poorer than we could have been, especially compared to some of our European neighbours. Without borrowing, this creates a particular crunch around public spending.

In simple terms, as the economy grows, more money becomes available for public services even if the proportion of tax remains the same. As Liz Truss delighted in putting it, if you increase the size of the pie, the slices get bigger. The problem for Britain is that we have failed to do this, meaning that even to keep services at the same level requires a greater proportion of spending, which must come either from borrowing or taxation.

But with the price of borrowing increasing and the markets averse to unfunded promises, the government is unwilling to commit to more debt-led spending. Hunt, then, faces a stark choice: between protecting services by raising taxes and protecting households by cutting spending. Hunt is likely to chart a course through the middle of both, with a sober budget that both increases personal taxation and reduces public spending. Neither of these is likely to be popular.

It is unclear where any new austerity will come from. “Efficiency savings” have largely failed to materialise and an air of dereliction now hangs about the public realm: NHS appointments are oversubscribed, the police overstretched, and councils cutting back, while staff are demoralised and likely to turn militant if faced with further pay attrition. This has an economic effect but is also a political problem for the Chancellor.

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Austerity was never a popular platform beyond a few evangelists for the small state. It worked to win elections when contrasted with perceived Labour profligacy and an immediate emergency (the 2008 crash), and was focused on those who would rarely vote Tory anyway. Households in the shires can stomach slashing Universal Credit and foreign aid, but do not like it when things they value are cut. A Conservative Chancellor could slice away benefits but would face electoral wrath if they force councils to abandon weekly bin collections. The biggest test of this is, of course, the triple-lock pensions increase, where the beneficiaries are most likely to vote Tory.

The temptation for a Chancellor is therefore to cut the things people cannot really see — long-term expenditure. Proposed infrastructure spending is easier to reduce or cancel because the public do not feel its impact for a decade or so, but this is a false economy. The Russian invasion of Ukraine highlighted the folly of failing to build nuclear power or maintain gas storage, while many British cities find their growth stymied by a lack of transport investment. Underinvesting now will only preserve those problems.

In the Eighties, Harold Macmillan lamented that Thatcher’s government saw no difference between income and capital when it came to money coming in, viewing receipts from privatisation as much the same as taxation income. He saw the government as like an old aristocratic family, selling the family assets and living on the receipts day-to-day. Now the party must avoid making the same mistake with expenditure and discriminate between the things which will fuel growth, and which will not — as “Supermac” might put it, you cannot keep buying champagne while cancelling the restoration of the Caravaggio that brings the day-trippers in.

Part of the strength of the Sunak campaign to replace Truss was that he was at home in the world of finance — that he could speak the language and understand the fears of those who lend Britain money. His years in the City should have taught him something else: the difference between streamlining and hamstringing. Cutting spending and restructuring borrowing only adds value if growth is unimpeded.

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And yet, chastened by the mini-budget, Hunt seems poised to revert to the austerity of the first half of the decade. The issue he faces is that without something to stimulate further growth, he is just making a rod for his own, and the country’s back. Like any Tory, he will also find it difficult to navigate around the economic costs of Brexit. At the same time, borrowing more to spend cedes political ground to Labour, who can then outbid the Tories and trap them in their own hypocrisy.

There is, however, one aspect in which the Chancellor can be liberated this Thursday. If he’s smart, he will understand the party has already lost the next election. The drop in polling established by a year of Johnson and accelerated by the Truss debacle offers little chance of resurrection. There should be fewer giveaways for favourite groups, more governing in the national interest. Where normally budgets are padded with electoral quid pro quos, such as nudging up tax allowances or funding for towns in marginal seats, the Tories are on to such a loser this can probably be avoided.

When Hunt comes to the despatch box on Thursday, he will be constricted by the realities of a complex economic crisis and the political decisions that brought us there. Though leaks from Downing Street suggest all manner of changes are on the table, the path to success is narrow. His decisions are fettered, and there’s no shouting “I’m a Chancellor get me out of here”. The question is whether he finds the catalyst for growth, or simply tightens the vice.

That moment is upon No 10 now — with a brutal twist. Normally it is possible to blame external circumstances, often a political rival ruthlessly splitting the party to seize the crown, reckless of the damage caused.

This time it is entirely a situation of the Prime Minister’s making. It is her policies, the ones she set out in her leadership campaign, which have been fully implemented and more. It is her Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, who spooked the markets by sacking his Permanent Secretary, the most senior civil servant in the Treasury; preventing the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, a Tory creation, from publishing forecasts of the Government’s “mini-budget”; and wanting to abolish the top rate of income tax, on top of ending the cap on bankers’ bonuses. Three strikes and Kwarteng was out.

Is there a way through? Very possibly. Truss is facing the ultimate gang who couldn’t shoot straight. The parliamentary Conservative party is often called the most sophisticated electorate in the world — a phrase which is only true if you construe “sophisticated” according to the Elizabethan meaning of the word. These are the MPs who chose Theresa May, who lost a 20-point lead and a majority in an election against Jeremy Corbyn. They then plumped for Boris Johnson who governed as he has lived — as a Lord of Misrule. He became the only prime minister to have been found guilty of breaking the law — rules for which he had legislated, but in character had clearly failed to read.

This most “sophisticated” electorate has surpassed itself with a free market leader who has now been judged freely by those very markets. As a great Strathclyde Regional Council leader once said to me, speaking of his hundred strong Labour group of councillors: “Ah wouldnae let them walk my dog round the block. And I don’t have a dog.”

If, now, the appointment of Jeremy Hunt, a former Cabinet minister with no Treasury experience who fell out of the Tory leadership in the first round, is being hailed as a stroke of Machiavellian genius, perhaps it is possible to discern a faint and very narrow path to victory for the Prime Minister — or at least to survival, which feels like the same thing.

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Liz Truss makes the case for Labour

By John McTernan

Time, as Sheryl Sandberg says, to lean in. Own the pivot; it is not, emphatically, a U-turn. Double down. Declare that you are governing in the national interest. Show it. Raise VAT at the same time as raising benefits in line with inflation. Throw in a new Deficit Repayment levy of 5% for earners over £100,000. Dare Labour to oppose such compassionate conservatism. Tighten belts by moving capital spending to the Right rather than cancelling any projects. Day by day, get to the end of the week, the end of the month, then Christmas. Then the energy package starts to kick in and reduce the rate of inflation.

Of course, politics doesn’t take place only in a government. Already, like “Snakes on a Plane”, letter writers are coiling into view. And plotters are briefing the lobby. There are so many schemes swirling around but they all amount to one proposition: replacing the Prime Minister without an election. The number of names being floated suggests one single problem — when you are looking for a unity candidate it is the unity which is necessary not the candidate. And Tory plotters face not only an immovable object — Prime Minister Truss — but also an irresistible force — the ambition of Suella Braverman. Such ideologically divided parties heal only slowly, and over a long period in opposition.

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Is Truss the worst PM in history?

By Dominic Sandbrook

But what about the Opposition? Says no one. Ever. The bitter truth of the UK’s first-past-the-post system is that while the Government looks rudderless, the Tory party has a working majority of 69 and can do what it likes until it no longer has that majority. Which could be as far off as 2025, given the maximum permissible time this parliament could run. And everyone, including the Opposition, knows this. The action is with the Government and even if it is a car crash everyone driving past is slowing down and gazing in a mixture of awe and horror.

To get any cut through, Labour needs to change gear and get edgier. This is a tough ask. Not just because being showy is something that neither Keir Starmer nor Rachel Reeves, his Shadow Chancellor, are comfortable with. But also because as the alternative government, they too have to be careful not to spook the markets or the voters. Because while more than 50% in a dozen polls does suggest a settled will, it also means that Labour’s support is so broad it goes deeply into voters who are far from the unionised, statist, tax and spend heart of the party. This is a fragile coalition that should be nurtured — not confronted.

Time, then, for some creative campaigning. Labour needs to show, not tell; it must demonstrate it is a new broad coalition by co-opting public figures like Jamie Oliver. His passionate campaign for extending free school meals is making waves — appoint him to head a Food and Healthy Eating Commission. Oppositions can be fleet-footed, after all, they aren’t running anything. Starmer should capitalise on that to exploit slips by the Government where they can become symbols of how Labour occupies the middle ground.

If the Government spurns plans for an information campaign, the Labour should bring the TUC and Age UK together to run one. When the Government abandons smoking cessation programmes, Labour should bring its digital campaigners together with all the medical unions and volunteers from the creative industries to generate an innovative campaign. Don’t just look like the alternative government, act like it too.

High-minded campaigns should be matched by low politics too. Find every opportunity to use parliamentary votes to defeat the government — or use the threat of defeat to paralyse them. Too scared to lose votes, the Government will try not to legislate and create a Zombie parliament. But Labour should be chipping away at the Tory majority, looking for people to cross the floor. All its MPs should be on Defection Watch — and any Tory MPs who switch sides should be promised and given a safe seat. (Though with Labour on current polling, just being allowed to be the Labour candidate in your own seat would probably work for many.)

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How powerful is Liz Truss?

By Terry Eagleton

Everything has to be about image, change and momentum. Most of all for Keir Starmer, who must spend almost all of his time on the road — selling his policies and himself. It’s important that the whole country understands “green growth” means reindustrialisation and jobs, jobs, jobs. And they also need to see that Keir likes a beer, loves football and will actually listen to them.

Time is always the most precious commodity in politics — you need it to change perceptions, or to heal wounds. And time is moving very differently for Starmer and Truss right now. The Opposition leader needs events to speed up, the Prime Minister needs them to slow down.

The news is mixed for Liz Truss this morning. The actions of the Government are decisive and calming: more tax cuts from the mini-budget reversed and a statement from the new Chancellor in the House. This will calm the markets, but not the parliamentary Conservative Party. The backbenches are restless and getting more febrile, and WhatsApp makes spreading rumours to each other and to journalists so much easier and faster. This is why it is reported that Tory MPs believe the Prime Minister has to go — “it’s when not if” — but remain unclear what mechanism can be used.

Government is often described as a marathon not a sprint; for Liz Truss this week is a marathon of sprints to stay ahead of the mob.

Later that evening, he tells her: “I’ve done some maths — we can just about afford to buy a gardenless 1.5 bed flat in Catford and have a baby, if we reduce our food budget.” And they’re the lucky ones. And yet, is that all his country has to offer them? Britain’s answer to anyone who isn’t a home-owning pensioner today is, unfortunately, yes. The formerly normal aspiration to settle and start a family is out of reach for swathes of young people. A fundamental compact between conservative principles, and the party that is supposed to represent them, has been broken.

The next leader of the Conservative Party faces an economic emergency with few obvious solutions. Public finances remain in a dire state following an almost continuous stream of crises. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimates that the government has already spent as much as it did during the Financial Crash to support households through the current squeeze on living standards. House prices are a national disgrace, far exceeding historical trends on affordability and requiring decades of saving for average couples to even afford a deposit for a first home. Homeownership among the young has dwindled.

Britain tends to think of itself as an equal partner to countries such as France, the Netherlands and Germany in terms of incomes and living standards. This is a collective fantasy, which hasn’t been true for well over a decade. The reality shouldn’t be shocking, yet it remains so: Britain’s incomes and living standards have fallen far behind what were its peer nations only 15 years ago. “Across European countries, only households in Greece and Cyprus saw a worse performance between 2007 and 2018 than the UK,” found the Resolution Foundation. On its third consecutive Tory prime minister, and about to select its fourth, Britain isn’t working.

Does this seem like the time for a middle of the road party leadership candidate offering more of the same, a contest in which candidates simply take turns to outbid each other with Boomer-pleasing tax cuts? Or does a radical programme with a fresh-faced advocate need to step forward? The Tory party no longer has the theatrics of Brexit or a disruptive global pandemic to distract from these systemic, structural failings. The tide has gone out, the party isn’t wearing any knickers, and nobody is impressed by what there is to see.

Because the reality is that Britain’s national religion is no longer Anglican Christianity. It isn’t even the NHS. It is Pensionerism. Britain is a care home with a navy. And as the Baby Boomer cohort of voters ages, it is vital for the party’s long-term survival, not to mention morally just, for the party to begin mending the structural underpinnings of society that enable people to establish themselves and build families.

Brexit aside, if British conservatism is defined by anything, it is its reverence for community and continuity over radicalism and state interventionism. Asset ownership is vital for the maintenance of these values — increasing the country’s housing stock is a means to a conservative end. People who own houses invest in them for the long run and want them protected. These values express themselves in everything from taking care of a front garden, seeing it as a community as much as a personal asset, to favouring low levels of asset taxation on something “earned”.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

Graduates face a marginal tax rate of at least 50%. They are expected by Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey to exercise restraint when looking for pay rises, even in the face of nearly two decades of pay stagnation. Family homes are completely out of their reach. Ask yourself, how does this look compared to the comfort of homeownership and the 10% growth in the state pension, under the triple-lock policy, that shields pensioners from the same fate? Are we really all in this together?

Yet all attempts to reform this growth-killing inequity end in failure, such is the strength of the homeowner-pensioner lobby. Despite free enterprise fitting hand-in-glove with Conservative ideological orthodoxy, housing remains a market throttled by the state, with severe supply restriction enforced via irreformable planning forcing prices up. This has deleterious effects across swathes of public policy, from living standards, to fertility, to climate change.

Is it any surprise that productivity and post-housing cost income growth doesn’t exist in a market where any wage rises go straight to existing landowners in higher rents and prices, rather than resulting in an increased supply of houses? If increases in productivity don’t raise living standards, where is the incentive to increase productivity? Scaling this huge challenge must be the immediate, urgent priority of the next Conservative leader.

It’s been done before — look back to Margaret Thatcher’s reforming governments. But while Thatcher wielded the sword and cut through the Gordian knot of Britain’s public sector businesses and unions in the Eighties, she did this with the tailwinds of North Sea oil and gas revenues and entering government afresh, not 12 years into Conservative rule.

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Boris Johnson broke Britain

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Thatcher could even be said to have redistributed — a word we associate solely with the Left of politics — housing towards council housing tenants. She recognised that without homeownership, the facts of life ceased to be conservative. Nobody could imagine a Conservative government today redistributing housing wealth towards the young, regardless that much of it was ‘earned’ through planning restriction and loose monetary policy. It seems unlikely that any of today’s leadership candidates would — or could — wield such a sword as she did.

There is an obvious solution to all these structural problems: growth.

It is encouraging to see Sajid Javid identify growth as one of the key planks of his campaign for leader and for him to state that housing is a supply side issue, but less so to see Jeremy Hunt reflexively spouting a ludicrous unfunded promise to “cut all taxes”. Yet another demand-side reform. But Hunt’s reasoning is tragically logical: the next leader will not win the votes of members by attacking the party’s own base — which has become substantially older in recent years — over the lack of planning reform, the biggest cause of Britain’s anaemic growth record. What is required therefore is a dose of the dryly titled ‘policy entrepreneurialism’.

To win — and win properly, not just squeak into office just to prepare for election defeat in two years’ time — the next leader must shout from the rooftops about growth, while investing in clever innovative policy solutions. Seek softer community buy-in with policies that could encourage development while benefiting residents like Street Votes. Be radical. Call for the permanent abolition of Stamp Duty. The Treasury will fight you, but a universally-hated tax that increases market friction by preventing the elderly moving out of large family homes is a politically feasible housing policy reform. There’s £3.31bn in annual economic growth up for grabs!

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Build more houses, but be smart about it. Building is impossible in Chesham and Amersham? You’re a Conservative government with sky high prices in Labour-dominated, youthful cities! Ignore Chesham and Amersham. Build in the cities with the strongest price signals and if current residents don’t like it, let them vote even more Labour, or move away. Enabling growth in the productive cities will give you tax revenues to spend on public services, or enable you to cut taxes responsibly from their current postwar high.

The UK has some of the highest childcare costs in Europe according to the OECD. The cost of subsidising childcare to a level closer to the European average could bring more women into the labour force, thereby increasing economic growth while solving sex-based social inequality. Isn’t this win-win?

But already in this contest we see Suella Braverman open her candidacy with cheap promises to leave the European Court of Human Rights. This kind of policymaking would neatly follow on from the return of voluntary imperial measurements, and the probably unworkable Rwanda refugee policy. Meanwhile Sajid Javid, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss have all pledged to lower fuel taxes, an astonishingly regressive proposal that benefits the richest first while ignoring the pressing need for climate action. The party must learn: throwing red meat to the crowd doesn’t put red meat on the table.

Without Brexit to focus on, the Government has lost its sense of purpose. The next leader must be a strategist, cerebral, and yet still a salesman. Someone who recognises that there’s more to winning than winning itself, and declinist managerialism — that a far greater prize is changing peoples’ lives and your country, for the better.

The polls tell the story. Prime Ministers with a disapproval rating of 70% rarely last long. Nobody defies gravity forever. Margaret Thatcher didn’t; nor did Tony Blair, despite winning three elections. Johnson has won only one. And the next test is not far away. On 5 May voters across the country will go to the polls in the local elections. A terrible set of results, and more letters of no-confidence will surely flood in. For Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and their rivals, the prize must seem so tantalisingly close…

And yet, and yet. Political history is littered with examples of potential leaders who struck too soon or waited too long, future England captains whose moment never came. Nobody remembers the R. A. Butler governments of the late Fifties and early Sixties, because they never happened. A decade later, Roy Jenkins sharpened the knife, raised it high about his head and prepared to plunge it deep into Harold Wilson’s back… but the blow never fell. And a decade after that, everybody knew Tony Benn was going to become Labour leader one day — but he never did.

The list goes on. Willie Whitelaw delayed and delayed, loyal to the last to the beleaguered Ted Heath, and then found himself overtaken by, of all things, a woman. Michael Heseltine timed his deadly attack on Margaret Thatcher to perfection, only to discover that many of his fellow Conservative MPs would never forgive him for it.

Kenneth Clarke won three separate parliamentary ballots in three different Tory leadership contests, yet never wore the crown. David Davis arrived at the Conservative conference as a runaway favourite with two busty women in T-shirts reading “It’s DD for me”, only to find that the party faithful preferred a smooth-talking shepherd’s-hut enthusiast instead. Even Boris Johnson’s first leadership bid exploded on the launch pad, sabotaged by his chief engineer.

And then there’s the most disastrous campaign of all, the Labour moderates’ risible attempt to unseat Jeremy Corbyn in the summer of 2016. “Angela is a star in the Labour firmament. She will be at my right hand throughout this contest and if I am successful, Angela will be alongside me as my right-hand woman.” The words of the future Labour leader Owen Smith, talking about his erstwhile rival Angela Eagle. That was just five-and-a-half years ago. Dame Angela is still there somewhere, lurking unnoticed on the backbenches. But poor Smith isn’t even an MP.

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How to bring down a Prime Minister

By Dominic Sandbrook

It would be nice to claim there’s a clever formula for success, or to tease out some immutable “lessons from history”, but that would be disingenuous. There’s no formula. Indeed, the joy of political leadership campaigns is that nobody can quite predict the strange chemistry that makes a winner, the peculiar combination of luck and personality, the unforeseeable, unrepeatable point when man (or woman) meets moment.

Take Labour’s Roy Jenkins, the embodiment of metropolitan citizen-of-the-world liberalism, whose admirers often describe him as one of the best Prime Ministers Britain never had. In the spring of 1968, the only question was not if, but when. Following the humiliating devaluation of the pound a few months earlier, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, seemed crippled beyond recovery. The public had tired of his endless slipperiness, and as a smart and urbane crisis Chancellor — Rishi Sunak parallel alert! — Jenkins seemed the only plausible successor.

On the Labour benches Jenkins commanded what he called “a dedicated group of commandos, waiting as it were with their faces blackened for the opportunity to launch a Dieppe raid against the forces of opportunism”. Their leaders reported that they had assembled an elaborate system of ‘dissident cells’ comprising more than a hundred supporters, as well as an ‘inner group’ who would co-ordinate the revolt. At a secret meeting on 17 June the chief plotters even produced a definitive list of some 120 potential rebels. All they needed was the signal to strike.

It never came. A couple of weeks later, Jenkins told them to hold off for the time being. The premiership was so close — but he “did not want to be implicated in actually launching an action”. A convicted assassin, he believed, would never wear the crown: “I will never be caught with a dagger in my hand unless it is already smoking with my enemy’s blood”.

So Jenkins waited, and waited… and the moment passed. Wilson stayed on at Number 10 and Labour lost the next election. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Jenkins lost his sheen. He went from tomorrow’s man to yesterday’s, without ever having been today’s. By the time Wilson retired in the spring of 1976, Jenkins’s chance had vanished. He had fallen out with the party’s Left wing over Europe, but there was a palpable sense, too, that he lacked the killer instinct.

Later, in his memoirs, Jenkins fell back on the excuse that he had never been ambitious enough, a clever way of complimenting himself for his own failure. But some of his supporters told a different story. “Roy was too ambitious, not insufficiently ambitious,” wrote his friend David Marquand. “He never thought it was the right moment; he always thought it was too risky”. The stakes were too high; he was paralysed by the fear of missing out. I wonder if, one day, Sunak’s friends will tell a similar story?

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Nothing can save the BBC

By Dominic Sandbrook

What of Jenkins’s insistence that the assassin never wins the ultimate prize? Well, there’s always the lesson of Heseltine in 1990. But such a flamboyant showman would have been deeply distrusted by many Tory MPs even if he’d never lifted a finger against Margaret Thatcher. And there are plenty of telling examples of political hitmen who made it all the way. Stanley Baldwin, instrumental in terminating Austen Chamberlain’s leadership in 1922, became Tory leader himself two years later. And Harold Macmillan succeeded Anthony Eden in 1957 precisely because many Tory MPs thought that by knifing Eden in the back, he had showed the cold, single-minded ruthlessness that Rab Butler lacked.

Then there’s the best-known political assassin of all, an object lesson in pitiless opportunism. Margaret Thatcher had spent the first four years of the Seventies nodding and smiling at Ted Heath’s policy U-turns. Not once had she whispered a word of dissent. And when, after the second general election of 1974, she announced that she was challenging him for the leadership, nobody seriously thought she would win.

The story goes that when, as a courtesy, Thatcher visited Heath to warn him of her intentions, he said coldly: “You’ll lose.” The Conservative parliamentary party, agreed his old rival Enoch Powell, “wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent”. Even Mrs Thatcher’s family thought she was wasting her time. “You must be out of your mind,” remarked her husband Denis, not entirely supportively. “You haven’t got a hope.”

Yet as it turned out, Thatcher beat Heath by 130 votes to 119. (“A black day,” declared another of his old rivals, Reginald Maudling.) And now the strange magic of leadership contests took effect. With Heath gone, four new contenders, notably his lieutenant Willie Whitelaw, threw their hats into the ring. But it was too late; all the momentum lay with Thatcher. As the Telegraph remarked, it looked as if “a whole herd of fainthearts left it to a courageous and able woman to topple a formidable leader” and then “ganged up to deny her her just reward”. When the second ballot was held a week later, she stormed to victory. “My God!” exclaimed one Tory vice-chairman when the news came through. “The bitch has won!”

The other great canard about leadership elections is that you should keep an eye on the dark horse, with John Major’s victory in 1990 as Exhibit A. But was Major such a dark horse? He was, after all, Chancellor of the Exchequer, having just served a short stint as Foreign Secretary. It’s true that if the leadership election had been held a year or two earlier, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. But Major had timed his run to perfection, his victory a perfect example of how, in politics, you make your own luck. It would have been easy for him to waver in 1990: to bide his time and sit this one out. But he calculated, quite rightly, that he would never have a better chance. With cool, understated efficiency, he took it.

In reality, most dark horses never come remotely close to winning, and many soon relapse into utter obscurity. Who now recalls Peter Lilley’s leadership pitch in 1997? How many people look back on Michael Ancram as the great lost leader of 2001? Is there, perhaps, some parallel world in which Stephen Crabb faced Liam Fox in the final round of the Tory contest in 2016? Can there really be a universe where Mark Harper battled Esther McVey for the crown three years later?

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

Yet all of these people, presumably, must have imagined the pieces slotting into place: their colleagues marvelling at their unexpected talents, the other contenders falling away, the momentum sweeping them towards that historic audience at Buckingham Palace. Alas, it almost never works out that way. If you enter the contest as an outsider, you’re probably doomed before you start, because most MPs like backing winners.

A good example is one of the most colourful dark horses in modern political history, the hard-drinking, grammar-school-smiting Labour intellectual Tony Crosland. When Wilson resigned in 1976, Crosland fancied his chances. He looked at his rivals. Jim Callaghan, the favourite: too old. Michael Foot: too Left-wing. Roy Jenkins: too Right-wing. Denis Healey: too arrogant. Tony Benn: too mad. And it all seemed so straightforward. One by one the others would blow up, and Crosland would come through the middle.

So the future Prime Minister summoned his protégé, Roy Hattersley, who would surely play a key role in the victorious campaign. They got straight down to business. The most important thing, Crosland said, was to get a “decent vote” in the first ballot, and build strength from there. “I take it you’ll vote for me.”

Silence. Then, at last, Hattersley confessed. He didn’t want to waste his vote, and had already promised to back Callaghan. Crosland couldn’t believe his ears. It was all falling apart, and the campaign had barely started. “You’ll not vote for me?” he said. “Then fuck off.”

Crosland finished dead last in the 1976 leadership election, with just 19 votes. And the winner? Callaghan, just as everybody had predicted. Dark horses aren’t dark horses by accident. Favourites are favourites for a reason.

So are there no lessons at all for Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss — or for Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat and the host of other putative dark horses? Well, here are a few thoughts. Most politicians only get one chance. Miss your moment, and it never comes again. Courage is usually more admirable — and more effective — than caution. If you do stand, don’t say anything stupid. Ideally, don’t say anything at all.

None of this is very helpful, I know — not least because there are so many obvious exceptions. So to finish, here’s one ironclad rule of leadership contests, which may not be what the current hopefuls want to hear.

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By Aris Roussinos

Really, honestly, it would be better to lose. Losers always have more fun. Just ask yourself: would Roy Jenkins have been able to enjoy quite so many agreeable three-course dinners if he’d been Prime Minister? Or would he rather have been defending the Government’s policy on salmonella? Would Denis Healey have been free to appear on TV with Roger Moore and Dame Edna Everage? Or would he rather have been at a meeting in Frankfurt with Helmut Kohl? Would Ken Clarke have been happier organising a junior ministerial appointment for John Bercow, or smoking his fifth cigar of the night in some West End jazz club?

For this is the great unspoken truth about leadership contests: it’s a competition to see who’s going to be the most despised person in the country in a couple of years’ time. Yes, you get to have your picture on the Downing Street stairs, just along from Gordon Brown and Theresa May. But as they would surely tell you, being Prime Minister is awful. Everything goes wrong, and everybody hates you. So instead of agonising about when to declare and what to say, just don’t do it. You’ll have a much happier life if you stay out, and the country will thank you for it.

Here endeth the lesson. Liz, Rishi: don’t say I didn’t warn you.

For years now, people in the arts have been wishing for the culture brief to go to someone who is actually interested in culture. In 2011, there was consternation at Jeremy Hunt getting the culture, media and sport portfolio. A PR man, of all people! How, wondered a Guardian writer, could he ever understand “the extraordinary way the arts affect individuals and communities”?

Maria Miller was called “a philistine peg in a cultural hole” by the Times. Her successor Karen Bradley was treated with suspicion over the fact that her literary passions extended to crime fiction and re-reading A Christmas Carol once a year. And then there was Matt Hancock, whose passion for the arts reached the ecstatic heights of quite liking “Galway Girl” by Ed Sheeran (in 2018, that was the most intimate thing any of us knew about Hancock, and what a blessed time it was).

In “The Monkey’s Paw”, the man wishes to pay off his mortgage: he gets the money, but it’s a pay-off from his son being fatally mangled in an industrial accident. His wife begs him to wish their son alive again: that happens too, but their son is no longer recognisably human when he returns to their home. He is merely, horribly “the thing outside”. There is one wish left: the thing disappears and the couple are left alone.

For the arts world, Nadine Dorries is the thing outside. Never before has there been a secretary of state with such a clear affinity for their brief. Dorries doesn’t just like books — she writes them, a whole string of historical novels. She doesn’t just watch TV — she’s been a primetime star. And she isn’t just a passive observer of the digital world (which also comes under her purview) — she was one of the first MPs to be active online, and started blogging in the noughties, around the time David Cameron was still making woeful “tweet”/“twat” puns.

Yes, the arts world got what it wanted, and it is terrifying. The blog? A liability, which led to her being accused of improperly claiming expenses for a second home: she was only let off when she convinced investigators that she had been misleading the public about where she spent most of her time. “My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact,” she told the Parliamentary Committee on Standards and Privileges. “I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.”

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By Sarah Ditum

The prime time appearance? That was on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2012, and it also got her into trouble in parliament. She had the whip temporarily suspended in punishment for going into the jungle without informing the Conservative Party first, and was later censured by the standards watchdog for failing to declare her fee. Her constituents, too, seemed very annoyed that she’d chosen to spend time eating bugs rather than scrutinising white papers. Still, she wasn’t there too long: she was the first contestant to be eliminated.

The novels, at least, have been successful. She’s written 15 of them, and declared £120,000 in royalties over the last 12 months alone. Unfortunately, I have read one, and it was terrible. The Four Streets (published in 2014) is set among Irish immigrants in 1950s Liverpool. It features a “haughty, stuck-up Protestant bitch” as the villainess, the ghostly apparition of a noble redhead who died in childbirth, and a noncing priest who brings the whole community together for a vigilante castration. Characters say very authentic things like: “That’ll be grand for the boxty bread.”

If you wanted someone who understands the arts, well, here you go. Nadine Dorries could hardly be better credentialed. When the BBC begs for sympathy about the problems of balanced public service and value for money, she can give them a cool, hard stare and ask what it’s even for when people are perfectly happy watching footage of moderately recognisable people gagging over ostrich anus? When publishers mourn the troubles of sustaining the midlist, Dorries can pack them off with the suggestion that they put out blockbusting stories of sectarianism and the supernatural instead.

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From the perspective of media and the arts, the trouble with Dorries isn’t that she lacks an interest in culture: it’s that she’s too interested by half. She’s an opponent of the licence fee, and in 2019 tweeted that the BBC was “a biased leftwing organisation which is seriously failing in its political representation, from the top down.” Once Dorries gets stuck into her role, the public mauling the Right gave to the BBC’s new executive news editor Jess Brammar is probably going to look like playschool stuff.

She was also an early adopter of anti-wokeness. “Left wing snowflakes are killing comedy, tearing down historic statues, removing books from universities, dumbing down panto, removing Christ from Christmas and suppressing free speech,” she wrote in a 2017 tweet. “Sadly, it must be true, history does repeat itself. It will be music next.” (Right-wing snowflakes, of course, just pitch a fit about Brammar not liking Brexit, and they are apparently absolutely fine.) Sport — another of her responsibilities — can count itself lucky that she doesn’t seem to have a single thing to say about it.

Did history repeat? Was it music next? How, exactly, does one dumb down a panto? By putting more Jim Davidson into it? Dorries’ statements are tangled and belligerent, and for many in the culture industries, they disqualify her for the job she now has. That, of course, is the wrong way of looking at it: the fact that people are mad about her appointment is all the qualification she needs.

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Dorries is less Secretary of State for Culture, more Secretary of State for Culture Wars. There’s a fight out there to be picked against nervy liberal groupthink and the dominance of luxury beliefs within major institutions, and Dorries is eminently capable of picking it. The fact that her interventions demonstrate neither good faith nor nuance on the issue is not a disadvantage, it’s a boon: every time she wildly overstates her case, her opponents will wildly overstate theirs, and everyone will rush to their corners to renew their tribal loyalties ready for another round.

It’s this tendency that makes Dorries a worry for the arts, far more so than her terrible (yet popular!) fiction and her affinity with reality TV. Her parliamentary career does not suggest she will apply herself to her brief with great diligence or rigour, but she has an undoubted capacity to turn every minor dispute into a flame war. And the arts world will be unable to resist responding with passion, fury and polarisation. Because Dorries is the perfect bogeyman, an irresistibly perfect enemy: she’s exactly the thing they wished for.

Johnson, accompanied by Symonds for an immediate news conference, categorically denied wrongdoing, accusing the Met of a “shameful attempt to subvert democracy”. Friendly newspapers screamed about “unelected Remain-voting police chiefs’ political correctness”. Hunt extravagantly proclaimed his support for his rival, but in a way that left the Johnson camp furious: “Like anyone else accused of a serious crime, Boris Johnson is innocent until proven guilty,” Hunt solemnly declared.

The Met dropped the charges in September 2019, leading to the resignation of Commissioner Cressida Dick. But, by then, Hunt had settled into the role of Prime Minister, having been elected Tory leader on — of course — a 52:48 result. Keenly aware of that narrow margin, and the argument among some that his victory was illegitimate, he went to great lengths to accommodate Johnson allies in his Cabinet: Dominic Raab got the Home Office and Priti Patel the FCO. The biggest surprise was not Michael Gove as Chancellor though. It was Lord Cameron of Dean’s return to Government as International Development Secretary. “We are one Consevative family governing for One Nation,” Prime Minister Hunt declared after his first Cabinet meeting.

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But there was no place for Johnson, even after his exoneration: it was rumoured that he’d turned down Hunt’s offer of a new super-ministry for regional growth and industrial policy with the job of “narrowing the gap” between English regions. So that job went to young Rishi Sunak, while Johnson returned to the backbenches and writing lucrative columns finding fault with the new administration’s handling of the Brexit talks.

Such was Johnson’s detachment from government that there was even speculation that he would not seek re-election to the Commons when Hunt announced he would seek his own mandate from the electorate in a “battle of the Jeremies” general election in November 2019. Offered a stark choice between Hunt and Corbyn, Britain gave the new PM a majority, albeit a modest one. Labour clung on to several Tory target seats in the Midlands and the North, but the Tories enjoyed not just victory but the removal of every Lib Dem MP in England.

Back in office with a majority of just 40, many analysts predicted that Hunt risked becoming a posher John Major, picked apart over Europe by Tory rebels led by a reinvigorated Johnson.

That was the state of play in early January when the first reports came in of a human fatality from an unknown virus in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

“As a confident, global leader with first-rate businesses, scientists and technology, it’s important that we do everything we can to help our Chinese friends manage this virus,” Hunt told the Commons as he announced an offer of British assistance with the outbreak.

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The ensuing debate was mostly focused on the fact that the Chinese had shown no interest in the British offer, with Labour MPs accusing the PM of using international affairs to distract from his own party management worries. The paragraph in Hunt’s statement about a Cobra meeting to consider the UK activating its own domestic contingencies got much less attention.

In the six weeks that followed, Hunt statements on “the coronavirus” became a common occurrence at Westminster, and saw him start to build a modest international reputation as a leader just about ahead of the curve on what was now recognised as a pandemic. Some Westminster cynics were surprised by what they saw as the transformation of Hunt into a gritty national leader: “It’s like seeing a Blue Peter presenter presiding at a funeral,” wrote one sketchwriter.

But close Hunt-watchers were not surprised, remembering his days in mortal combat with the doctors’ union over new contracts for junior doctors in 2016. Then, he didn’t back down, even though that meant playing the heartless Tory hatchet-man while white-coated saints condemned him. No 10 aides briefed hacks that this battle had taught him that taking the harder road can pay off in the end.

In late February, in a decision influenced by Cameron, Hunt stepped up his “national leadership” pitch by inviting Labour’s shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth — but not his outgoing party leader, Corbyn — to join a new Cabinet subcommittee on the virus. The same invitation was also extended to the candidates to replace Corbyn, with Keir Starmer the first to signal acceptance. Hunt considered inviting Tony Blair to No 10 to discuss the pandemic, but instead settled for giving Blair’s old lieutenant Alan Milburn a cross-bench peerage and job at the Cabinet Office coordinating pandemic planning.

“Jeremy’s Big Tent politics” riled the Conservative Right, and gave Johnson more material for columns, but the polling data muffled the protests. Hunt went into March 2020 with strong approval ratings and a hefty Tory lead over Labour. That meant that when on March 5, acting in coordination with the government of Italy, Hunt announced a three-week national lockdown “to take control of the virus”, his decision was broadly welcomed in Parliament and among the public.

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Yet that decision was also where the trouble began for Hunt. By the early summer, Covid-19 had killed more than 25,000 Britons and the British figures were better than those for Italy and France and broadly comparable with Germany’s. But the UK economy had fallen off a cliff and Hunt faced accusations of not doing enough to support businesses and workers; anxious about the public finances are wary of being accused of trashing the Tory commitment to sound money, he’d limited the Treasury’s new “furlough” scheme to paying just two-thirds of workers’ wages.

Worries about the economic impact of the lockdown combined with a touch of hubris to persuade Hunt to declare “victory” over the virus in late June 2020, a couple of weeks after New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern had declared her nation covid-free. “Britain is open for business again and we can now lead the world into the post-Covid future,” Hunt declared at a smoothly choreographed press conference at the Royal Festival Hall in London, where a slightly underwhelming line-up of British business leaders announced plans to reopen and rehire.

Oddly though, Business Secretary Sunak was missing from the event. No 10 claimed that was down to mundane logistics (“His helicopter broke down”) but party colleagues knew that Sunak had been spending more and more time in conversation with Johnson. Johnson himself was saying little, beyond columns in which he called for more Government spending to support the economy and the “British heartlands that have suffered so much this year”. He also made repeated appeals for Hunt to guarantee that the Conservative Party conference would go ahead in Birmingham as planned.

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After a blissful summer of something like normal life, that conference took place as Hunt’s “victory” started to fray. Covid cases were starting to tick up again, prompting another Cobra meeting and talk of another early intervention from the PM.

But Johnson moved even earlier. His conference speech was packed with admirers ignoring the notional government guidance on social distancing, and his message was clear: no more restrictions. “My friends, I have reluctantly reached the conclusion that our admirable Prime Minister has used an industrial grade twin-cylinder tungsten steel power hammer to crack the microscopic nut that is this virus. And in so doing, he has shattered businesses, jobs and something even more precious, our ancient British liberties. I say, No More Lockdowns. I say it’s time to take back control of this country from doomsaying doctors and this gloombucket government. No More Lockdowns! Set Britain Free!”

Facing a resurgent Johnson, backed by the old Vote Leave machine and firing out barrages of three-word slogans, Hunt struggled to hold together the coalition he’d built for his safety-first approach to the pandemic. Tory grumbling about economics and liberty grew, but in the end, it was events inside the Labour Party that did for him.

With the virus returning in parts of the country, Hunt sought a series of regional deals with local leaders to agree new control measures, an approach that left him even more reliant on Starmer’s cooperation to secure local Labour buy-in. That bipartisan approach was to prove fatal to his leadership when the time came to agree a deal for Greater Manchester.

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The beginning of the end of the Hunt premiership was Sunak’s resignation over the prospect of a north-west lockdown. The end came two days later with the striking spectacle of Johnson and Andy Burnham, side-by-side on a wet Manchester pavement in angry protest against what Johnson called the “pub-closing, job-wrecking, fun-crushing tyranny of the medical elite and their puppet in Downing Street”.

Burnham’s key contribution to the fateful press conference was to call Hunt “a Surrey millionaire sitting in his big house in London, making plans with his Westminster mates to send Northern businesses to the wall — including a Labour leader who should be standing up to him, not sucking up”.

From there, there were only a few short steps to a position where Johnson was installed as Britain’s fourth prime minister in four years, at the head of a Cabinet conspicuously lacking a development secretary following that post’s brisk abolition. (“Sorry, Dave old chum.”)

At his first PMQs in early November 2020, the new premier wished his predecessor well in his new role as British ambassador to China, and greeted Starmer with a cheery smile and a benediction: “May I wish him all the best of British luck in his own leadership contest against the estimable Mayor of Greater Manchester, Mr Speaker?”

The Covid-19 crisis is one reason for this exodus, but only one. Although a majority of doctors surveyed reported that the Government’s handling of the pandemic had made them more likely to leave the NHS, a much more significant factor was the lack of a real-terms pay rise. And indeed, at the beginning of this year, just before the pandemic took hold, an article in the BMJ warned of the threat of “Drexit (Doctor-Exit)”, described as:

“… the exponentially growing trend for doctors to walk away from their jobs in the NHS, either to new healthcare systems overseas such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand or perhaps worse, into new professions altogether, leaving behind their well-trained medical brains. This exodus has been gaining momentum for several years with the workforce now at breaking point.”

I’m a medical school drop-out. I applied for reasons that were, in retrospect, a bit silly; I liked both arts and science subjects, and thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that a medical degree could neatly combine the two. Also, I really did want to “help people” — pat, I know, but true.

I got in, I disliked it, I failed my first-year exams and, rather than resitting them, I decided to leave. The experience has left me with a very patchy knowledge of the human body (for instance I know a surprising amount about the anatomy of the thorax, and next to nothing about the anatomy of the head). But it hasn’t left me with any feelings of wistfulness — because I don’t know a single junior doctor who is happy in the job.

At the end of last year, I met up with four old friends from medical school, some of whom I hadn’t seen since I left. All of these women are highly capable graduates of UCL, one of the best and oldest medical schools in the world. But only one of them intends to remain in NHS clinical practice. One is leaving to do private cosmetic work, one is going into hospital management, and another is leaving the profession altogether. I also know several doctors who have emigrated to South Africa or Australia, enticed by a higher salary and a lower cost of living.

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And why on earth wouldn’t they? As I know all too well, the desire to “help people” may be genuine, but it doesn’t always last. Medical students are selected for the three magic traits that together produce a highly desirable worker: high intelligence, industriousness, and good communication skills. With these talents, almost all could go and work in the city and earn lots of money if they wanted to. Or they could choose a lower paid role that offers a comfortable work-life balance.

Medicine can offer plenty of money and some flexibility (a part-time GP still has a pretty sweet deal), but first you have to spend five or six years studying, followed by many more years training, and with your choice of job and location severely constrained. A friend of mine was desperate for a foundation years placement within striking distance of her mum, so that she could call on her for childcare during long overnight shifts. But she was at the mercy of an NHS bureaucracy that obstructed this eminently reasonable request every step of the way. No wonder young doctors are so angry.

Pay is a large part of the problem. Post-austerity, doctors’ salaries dropped by 8% between 2010 and 2015. New graduates now leave medical school, flushed with pride at their achievement, only to be greeted by a basic salary of £28k, well below the sum needed to buy a home in the most expensive parts of the country.

But there is also that far more slippery and sensitive issue of status. Although the public do still consistently put doctors and nurses at the top of the list of most trusted professionals, the long term shift from a paternalistic to an egalitarian model of doctor-patient relationship has come with costs. Medical students are warned of the risks of acting in the bad old style: striding imperiously down a ward and giving orders with no regard for the patient’s preferences. But in the bad new style, patients consult “Dr. Google” before arrival, take no heed of a clinician’s expertise, and dismissively use her first name.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt even suggested that the NHS should do away with “stuffy titles” because he believed that a hierarchical team structure led to more mistakes. Of course, Hunt also imposed punitive contract changes that triggered a general strike among junior doctors, the first such industrial action in 40 years. Bad pay, bad conditions and not even a “stuffy title” to provide some self-respect — no wonder the medics I know still refer to Jeremy Hunt in Cockney rhyming slang.

How much of this drop in status is to do with the fact that, for the first time in history, medical school graduates are majority female? Germaine Greer wrote in 1999 that “[p]restige and power have seeped out of professions as women joined them. Teaching is already rock-bottom; medicine is sliding fast”. A 2009 study of US census data from 1950 to 2000 backed up Greer’s claim, demonstrating that as professions become female-dominated, pay and prestige both drop.

As a rule, I am suspicious of any explanation for a complex social phenomenon that leans too heavily on individual malice. I know full well that the gender pay gap is overwhelmingly not the result of sexist recruiters, but rather of biology: put crudely, women have babies, and babies don’t get along well with full-time jobs. But the usual explanations for the pay gap still don’t quite explain why so-called “occupational feminisation” seems to be the kiss of death when it comes to professional prestige. Maybe there really is something about women qua women that inspires a lack of respect in patients, bosses and politicians.

And things could yet get worse. The automation revolution is expected to have a dumbbell-shaped effect on the economy, with very low skilled and very high skilled jobs first in line to be replaced by artificial intelligence. So truck drivers, fruit pickers, and factory workers will lose their jobs, but so will lawyers, accountants, and — yes, possibly — doctors.

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Funnily enough, I’ve heard on the grapevine that a medic I was friends with at UCL has now left clinical practice and is working for a tech company trying to develop robot doctors (she never did like patients much). The broader project is going well: AI can already outperform radiographers at some tasks, and recently a computer-controlled robot successfully performed intestinal surgery on a pig. Right now, “Dr. Google” is just an annoyance for doctors; soon, though, it could be coming for their jobs.

Although not entirely. David Goodhart’s new book offers a useful way of thinking about the coming impact of automation, with the blow likely to fall hardest on what Goodhart calls “head” (professional) and “hand” (manual) jobs, leaving “heart” (care) jobs mostly unscathed. Medicine is, to some extent, a combination of all three, since the role requires a combination of brains, dexterity, and bedside manner. But it has traditionally been classed more within the “head” category which, as Goodhart argues, currently enjoys a dysfunctionally high level of income and prestige.

“Heart” jobs will survive automation because they involve the kind of human touch and warmth that machines cannot easily imitate. The heart component of the doctor’s role is therefore likely to survive, even if a patient can step into a full-body scanner for diagnosis, take a pill perfectly tailored to their genetic profile, and undergo surgery carried out by a robot controlled by a surgeon on the other side of the world, or even no human surgeon at all.

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Even with access to the most sophisticated AI, doctors will never be entirely redundant, since patients will still need someone to hold their hand and direct them towards the waiting machines. But think: if doctors have lost all of the high status “head” roles and are left only with the “heart”, is anyone really going to continue using their “stuffy titles”? Their prestige, already diminished, could hardly survive such a development. Doctors could find themselves sunk to the status level of nurses, another majority-female profession who are loved, trusted, but also regularly disrespected (not least, I’m sorry to say, by doctors).

Doctors don’t want sentimentalism. The ones I know didn’t mind the “clap for carers”, but they didn’t like it much either, since the gesture did nothing to change their working conditions. While they still can, many will reject bad pay and falling status by voting with their feet, as two-thirds apparently intend to. But with the rise of automation, their options may become more limited. This historically stable and lucrative profession is in trouble, and a sincere desire to “help people” might not be enough to save it.

Johnson was introduced by Liz Truss in blood red, as hard as he is soft, promising enforcement of the dream. Then he wove narratives in the air. His narratives, which I think he cannot help, are shameful and multiple. Sometimes they are not even ambitious.

“The fantastic ExCeL building!” he shouted, waving at the interior of this massive shed, as if it were the Royal Albert Hall at the Last Night of the Proms. He can gild ExCel, is his message. He can gild anything, even darkness: it is always darkest, he reminded us, before the dawn. He meant: Brexit is the dawn.

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He looked clean this time at least, and unfrightened. He used to look quite frightened when power approached – and he has the tidiest hair of his life. Boris’s hair is his spirit animal; it tells you the state of his mind. Iain Dale, the grumpy MC, who moaned at the stewards struggling to get microphones to Tory members’ mouths, asked him if he dyes his hair. That is all the lobby is talking about, Dale said, which gives you an idea of the state of the lobby, who are required, these days, to analyse the subconscious yearnings of voters; to rationalise what is insane. Boris refused to answer. For him, personal questions are a short road to hell.

He waved a kipper around instead and said that the EU demanded it be posted to customers with an expensive “plastic ice pillow” which will harm British profits. Brexiteers love to invoke fish. It reminds people that we are an island. The next day the EU said this was not their regulation; they have nothing to say on smoked fish, only fresh fish. But that is Boris’s way: build straw men, and then dismantle them, or not.

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He talked about the non-existent threat to Mars Bars – Remainers say there will be no Mars Bars, or water, after Brexit.  Then he asked: do you think this great country is incapable of making Christmas dinner? It is not really a joke, even if people laughed. It is an insinuation: does it follow that Jeremy Hunt thinks this great country is not capable of making Christmas dinner, and is therefore not a great country at all?

When asked about the Brexit Party’s threat to the Tory Party, he admitted he once met Nigel Farage in a pub for a “cold war summit”. (Always look backwards in time. His constituency does). Why? “I was then a journalist,” he said, with mirth in his eyes. He is still a journalist, and this is his greatest column yet.

He used the old tools though. He gave the stripping look – I would love you if I could – to a woman who asked about debt management. Does he save money? “I’ve certainly spent a lot,” he said. He might have said: “I’ve earned a lot”. It is more Tory. “I’ve spent a lot” is more Trumpian. It says: live through me, for I am a scruffy faux-aristocrat who has known hot women. I am effortless.

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If Great Britain is his Christmas tree, he hangs progressive baubles on it: the dream is yours. Just touch it. The introductory film saw him smiling at Muslims and Jews, lord of a nation whose founding myth belongs to a time when such people were rarely admitted. He is, of course, pro-choice. He praised the idea of a carbon neutral Britain by 2050. He reprimanded Trump for his most recent racist comments, and looked pleased with himself.

Against this necromancy, Hunt is powerless. He looks small and damply middle-class. He doesn’t daydream, or flirt. He can’t speak, as Johnson does, to a national Id. He can’t speak to the hunger, because he doesn’t feel it himself. It doesn’t help that he talks like David Brent from the Office and looks like Nick Clegg: at best, a technocrat. Isn’t that what we are fleeing from?

Brexit has exposed Britain’s devotion to class; many things are exposed by the tide of Brexit. Boris the faux aristocrat could conceivably arrive by horse. Hunt might own a small SUV, and where is the glory in that?

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Hunt was introduced by a 21-year-old girl, who had fled from Johnson like a spurned lover. I’m still not sure why. She called Hunt the modern Ernest Shackleton. Does that make Johnson the ice? His hands were on his hips; his jacket was off like Call Me Dave [Cameron] in 2006; he looked like he might burst into song. He tried to be funny. He mocked his name; he wondered if his personal hashtag should be #TakeaPuntonHunt; he wondered if he should call himself Hunty McHunt Face. I think he should. Even so, jokes are Boris’s battle-field and Hunt does not belong there.

His pitch is that he is a serious man, and he requires serious questions. Soon Hunty McHunt Face was bogged down in questions about mental health, hospices and tax. He responded reasonably, with some terrible flourishes. He wants to land an economic jumbo jet on Europe’s doorstep. He feels democracy in his gut. He wants to abolish literacy. (That was a mistake).

I sensed that he has already conceded: he said that the Back Boris and It Has To Be Hunt signs should merge at the end. “That is what our country deserves.” He said he would serve at the pleasure of the prime minister, and everyone leaked away.