When Kwasi Kwarteng claimed last month that his budget-busting plan for growth would usher in a “new era”, it appears unlikely he had in mind a sterling crash, rocketing mortgage rates, a 33-point poll lead for Keir Starmer and a humiliating climbdown, all within the space of 10 days. But Kwarteng and Liz Truss’s bold economic experiment, hailed with glee by the free-market thinktanks, has been comprehensively trashed. After the “mini”-budget, the chancellor was sufficiently relaxed to take his advisers to a Whitehall pub and pose for selfies with the landlady. By the end of last week, he was scrambling to find spending cuts to make his sums add up in the face of soaring borrowing costs.
Last weekend, Truss was in full bullish mode, insisting on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show that she would “stand by” the mini-budget announced on 23 September, which handed bigger
