Backseat driver Hunt puts the Age of Truss in reverse

No, it’s actually still Liz Truss, who last week had no choice but to take the brave and decisive action of firing the chancellor of the exchequer for carrying out all the policies she’d told him to. One wonders if Kwasi Kwarteng found his own demise as hilarious as he appeared to find that of HM the Queen, given that he only found out he’d been sacked when he read it on the Times website.

It’s perhaps emblematic of Kwarteng’s prowess as chancellor that he didn’t even manage to break the record for the shortest time spent in No 11 (38 days), although given that the record holder, Iain Macleod (30 days), dropped dead of a heart attack while still in office, he is at least the chancellor to have been sacked the soonest after being appointed. Cheer up, Kwasi – a win’s a win.

Meanwhile, it’s still less than a week since Hunt was installed as the new chancellor, so I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb and assume he’s still got the job. News of Hunt’s appointment was met with trepidation, not least from the nation’s TV and radio newsreaders and reporters, who will now presumably have to spend at least the next few months trying not to mispronounce his surname.

Quite what Truss’s thinking was in elevating Hunt remains a mystery; he represents the opposite wing of the party to her and was a vocal supporter of her rival Rishi Sunak (who has yet to comment on the ongoing situation; perhaps because he’s too convulsed with laughter to get the words out).

Nevertheless, she has already announced that she and Mr Hunt are “in lockstep”, which, slightly worryingly from Jez’s point of view, is exactly what she said about the last guy right up until she lockstepped him under the bus.

The fact that Hunt is a political “heavyweight” of rather longer standing than Ms Truss herself has inevitably given rise to speculation that henceforth he, rather than the prime minister, will be the one “calling the shots”. Under different circumstances I’d regard this as just another example of the institutionalised misogyny which blights political discourse in our
nation, but actually… he is, isn’t he?

Hunt immediately announced plans to reverse more or less ALL the tax measures proposed by Kwarteng’s mini-budget. Government apologists were swift to reject the idea that this was a “U-turn”. A reversal, they pointed out, is NOT a U-turn; in a U-turn you swing the car around until it points in the opposite direction. What Mr Hunt was doing, they said, was slamming the car into reverse and screaming off backwards, Fast and Furious style, without so much as a glance over his shoulder as terrified pedestrians leapt out of his way.

Whether phase 2 of the Age of Truss will meet with better fortune than phase 1 is anyone’s guess, as indeed is how long it’s likely to last. On the face of it, it seems unlikely that the government would call a general election at a moment when the parliamentary Conservative Party would be all but eradicated, but it’s not entirely unthinkable.

Hunt may yet come to the conclusion that the economy is now so broken that the most politically prudent thing to do would be to lose an election and spend a few years in opposition watching Labour trying to sort it out. Thus the Tories would honour another one of their proudest traditions: making a ghastly mess and leaving the lower orders to clean it up.

POEM OF THE WEEK

Every politician
Of every kind and hue
Knows there’s one thing in particular
You can’t be seen to do.
Avoid the dreaded U-Turn!
Forge straight ahead my friend
Or else in all the headlines
You’ll never hear the end.
Call it “course correction”
A more agreeable name
Though the people know a U-Turn
When they see one all the same.
Mrs Thatcher, you’ll remember
Dismissed them out of hand
With a literary allusion
Which she didn’t understand.
Our current crop of leaders’
Confusion is complete
It’s gone way beyond a U-Turn
They’re doing donuts in the street.