Take one day. Today. The Bank of England has again intervened to ensure there isn’t a fire sale of UK government bonds by pension funds. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has published a report saying the government will have to find £60bn of spending cuts over four years to pay for the recent mini-budget. The International Monetary Fund has restated its criticism of said mini-budget indicating that the unfunded cuts will ramp up inflation.
With all this going on, you might have thought that Kwasi Kwarteng and his Treasury gang might have been feeling a bit chastened. Nervous even. After all, it’s not every chancellor who gets to screw up their first budget on such a grand scale. Normally that’s the kind of achievement that takes years of acquired incompetence.
But not a bit of it. Kamikwasi was hell-bent on celebrating at his first departmental questions since his self-styled fiscal event. He is clearly triumphant at hitting the halfwit jackpot on his first time out. There were no apologies for increasing mortgages by £500 a month or wasting £45bn in government bailouts. That would just be talking Britain down. Instead, what we got was a prolonged lap of honour. In his own mind – and that of his junior ministers, if indeed Chris Philp can be said to have a mind – his budget has been an unmitigated success.
The Tory backbencher John Baron set the tone by observing that the growth plan was a thing of wonder. The thing was not to take the markets too seriously as they were members of the Anti-Growth Coalition. It’s come to something when even the pound can’t be trusted to be properly British. Quite right, said Kamikwasi. And he wasn’t going to take any lectures from any of the opposition parties because they too were signed up to the militant wing of the AGC.
Amazing. Ministers have literally just picked out the worst line in Liz Truss’s conference speech – and let’s face it, that’s a mind-numbingly low bar as the rest of it was both inane and forgettable – and chosen to use it as an attack line. Because even in the Tory party itself at least three-quarters of its members are also part of the AGC. Only the lobotomised believe in Kamikwasi’s plan. The numbers just don’t add up.
Kwarteng wasn’t the only one at it. The junior treasury minister Andrew Griffith also used the AGC as a catch-all excuse for not answering any questions. He thought interest rates were going up everywhere and it was a matter of honour to have them go up most in the UK. Because we were a world-beating economy. He really will say any old nonsense. At least he has the grace to look as if he doesn’t believe most of it. Unlike Philp, who doesn’t have a conscience to betray. Merely a nose in search of the nearest bum. Someone whose only cause is self-advancement.
It’s as if the government is in denial. It has already been forced into one U-turn over the abolition of the 45p top rate of income tax and has yet to work out how to pay for other unfunded tax cuts, but it still believes it has discovered the keys to the promised land. Indeed, when Labour’s Rachel Reeves gave Kamikwasi a quick reality check, he got quite agitated. Rattled even. The self-confidence is nothing more than a veneer.
The IMF had loved his budget, he insisted. It was the best of all budgets in the best of all possible worlds. The IMF alone had perceived his genius. Which was to stimulate growth through rampant inflation. Kamikwasi couldn’t think why other governments hadn’t thought of this already. There again, he couldn’t help always being six steps ahead of everyone else. Philp looked up adoringly. “You’re eight steps ahead of me,” he cooed.
Still, in the real world there was some good news for Kamikwasi. At least some of the budget sceptics weren’t too openly critical. The Treasury select committee chair, Mel Stride, merely advised him to canvass the opinions of his colleagues before proceeding with some of his more batshit ideas. And Julian Smith just wanted reassurance that he wasn’t going to pay for this mess by cutting benefits for the least well off.
Kwarteng muttered something noncommittal to both. He clearly hasn’t a clue what to do but has given himself til the end of the month to come up with something. Stand by for another flash of brilliance. Or not. Michael Gove looked as if he was about to make trouble, but thought better of it and left after 20 minutes. Perhaps he was off for a therapy session. Mindful colleagues had thoughtfully told the Sunday newspapers that he was a “troubled sadist”.
There was rather more clarity and intelligence to be found down the corridor where the Lords culture committee were taking evidence from a robot called Ai-Da, fully kitted out with her Anna Wintour bob and Anna Wintour sunglasses, along with her minder Aiden.
Just before the session began, Aiden took Ai-Da’s shades off. It wasn’t clear if this was because this was a task the robot couldn’t manage for herself or if she just couldn’t be bothered. Ai-Da’s head began to swivel slowly from side to side while her dead eyes looked vacantly ahead.
Suddenly things became clear. This is what being in a cabinet meeting with Liz Truss must be like. Ai-Da was just an unmedicated Radon Liz. OK, so at one point Ai-Da crashed and Aiden had to put her shades back on while she was being reset, and she wasn’t exactly the chattiest of robots as she could only give preprogrammed answers to questions which had been submitted in advance, but hey!
That’s a level of AI we can only dream about from our prime minister. The only person other than Theresa May to have failed the Turing Test. At least Ai-Da’s rather dull answers obeyed the normal syntax and punctuation of sentence construction. She actually made sense. Imagine that.
