Boris who? Theresa who? David who? The names escape her. Rishi who? Philip who? George who? The names elude him. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, the devil-may-care duo of Downing Street, declare themselves an audacious break with the failed orthodoxies of the past and bold heralds of a new era for Britain.
After the chancellor had finished unveiling his debt-financed bonanza of tax cuts on Friday, I heard one of the cabinet describe this as “a new administration” that had “only been in office for two weeks”. This is one of the oldest tricks in the Conservative playbook. Declare that you have arrived with a radically novel agenda to rescue Britain from the appalling mess inherited from your predecessors and hope that a frenetic display of activity will dizzy the public into forgetting that those predecessors were also Tories. In the case of Ms Truss, the feat can only succeed if voters are induced not to care that she was first given a ministerial job by David Cameron and has sat in the cabinet for eight of the dozen years that the Tories have been in power. In the case of Mr Kwarteng, he’d prefer us not to recall that he voted for every one of the Conservative budgets since 2010, the budgets he now repudiates for dooming Britain to a “vicious cycle of stagnation”.
