Voices: The Tories now know that they are fully naked – but they don’t know what to do about it

If the past insane month has carried within it a sense of unnerving deja vu, it is probably because you have read, or seen, the novel or TV series, A Very British Coup.

An ideologically motivated, somewhat unknown MP called Harry Perkins somehow becomes prime minister (no one is entirely sure how or why it happens, although there is at least an election involved). His policies immediately undermine the economy, he threatens to pull out of Nato and shadowy figures conspire to remove him before too much more harm can be done.

The early parts of the novel involve the radical government slashing interest rates to keep the currency under control. It seems incredible now, but in 1997, whatever residual fear the market may have had of a Labour government was instantly allayed when Gordon Brown announced, on his very first day as chancellor, that he would be making the Bank of England independent. That, in other words, the power to control interest rates he would gladly cede to someone else.

It is a measure of the hopelessness of the current government, 25 years on, that after setting their country’s economy on fire for no reason other than that they do not understand anything about what they are doing, their response has been to issue threats to remove that independence again. It is the clearest sign, among many clear ones, that they are utter wrong’uns.

But on they plough. A week on from the worst party conference since at least the mid-Eighties, it has now fallen to others to yet again point out the grotesque folly of what they are doing. The Bank of England has had to issue its second emergency warning in barely more than a week, intervening to protect people’s pensions from wipeout. Wipeout that would, without their intervention, be the direct consequence of an economically kamikaze government policy of borrowing tens of billions of pounds just to give it away again to those who need it least.

They know, now, that they are fully naked; that what they are has been clearly seen and clearly understood, but they don’t know what to do about it other than continue to double down. Kwasi Kwarteng and his ministerial team all had to come to the despatch box of the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon and all they could do was repeat their own insane platitudes that make no sense at the best of times and are an insult at the worst.

Andrew Griffith was there, pointing over the despatch box at Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP, repeating the most brainless political slogan in decades, about the “anti-growth coalition”, hours after the IMF slashed Britain’s growth forecast for 2023, yet again.

They claim that positive projected growth figures for 2022, which is almost over, are a consequence of a mini-Budget issued two weeks ago. They ignore the clearly stated fact that soaring government borrowing rates have not been included in the analysis.

Chris Philp, fast emerging as Hancock 2.0, for managing to pull off that rare blend of staggering naivety and hopeless sycophancy. He blends this with what, in more benign times, might be an almost endearing pathos: a glum desperation to be liked whilst being quite staggeringly dislikeable. Asked patiently about the latest aspects of the rolling binfire of his and his boss’s own making, the best he can do is stand there and whinny about how, “this government has a plan for growth, the opposition has no plan!”

It’s like watching a 13-year-old boy reluctantly having to pretend to be an inept Tory MP for some sort of mock parliament exercise, except that he’s not pretending, he really is this bad, and he really has, somehow, got this far.

Above them all wafts the self-appointed demi-god himself. Ever since Kwasi Kwarteng’s moment in the big time trashed his country’s economy and rendered him an instant joke from which he will never be able to recover, he has strutted about like exactly what he is. Which is to say, the semi-grown-up version of the boy at school who cries when they only get 98 per cent in their maths exam. He has swaggered to the lectern of his party conference to give a 20-minute shrug disguised as a speech. He can’t understand how he has failed this badly. This is not how life is meant to be for little public schoolboys who win prizes for Latin and Greek poetry.

Kwarteng is already phoning it in, and he will be from here on in as well. The most self-regarding man in Westminster turns out also to have been the most fragile. Now that he has been found so utterly wanting, he appears to not know what to do beyond sulk, and hope that the world might eventually re-remember that he is a genius, except that it won’t, because he isn’t.

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And that’s why the big boys keep having to move to undo him. The Bank of England has intervened twice now. The IMF has made statements to point out that, in their view, what he’s doing is dangerous.

Naturally, this fits the Very British Coup narrative as well. The economic fantasists, the libertarian right wingers, these people need to mind their own business. They can very easily be attacked as global elitists, “experts” that we’ve all had enough of, even though they’re very clearly doing their job and absolutely nothing more.

But it doesn’t work and it isn’t going to. The public can very clearly see that the only part of this that feels like a coup is a government that no one voted for, doing things that are the direct opposite of everything they were promised, and they can feel their hopes and dreams being trashed as a consequence. And it will end as it pointedly never began – with an actual election. The only remaining question is how much more damage can be done in the meantime.