Rishi Sunak is set to be our new Prime Minister and Tory dreams and fantasies may finally be coming to an end. For political parties, such bubble-bursting can be painful. Nigel Lawson’s boom in the late Eighties was followed by a prolonged bust. The “no more boom and bust” promises of Gordon Brown led to, funnily enough, both boom and bust. And, much more recently, the Liz Truss “deliver, deliver, deliver” mantra led to a financial upheaval and her own resignation.
After new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt decided to rip up almost every aspect of Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget, “sound money” looked like it was emerging victorious after a brief dalliance with “let’s borrow large amounts of additional money, pretend that growth is going to be a lot stronger than it has been in many a year and thus magically transform the economy and the nation’s finances”. Sunak’s success may merely rubber-stamp what Hunt was in the process of delivering.
