The new chancellor is set on high-stakes gambling with public finances

Editorial: Mr Kwarteng’s high-handed approach threatens to leave the public finances and the independence of the Bank of England wrecked in his dash for growth

His ambition is laudable but he invites failure because there is nothing much that he or a compliant civil service can do to bring it about (Getty)

There is – usually – nothing wrong with ministers being forceful and refusing to take “no” for an answer from their civil servants. But not, surely, when a new minister breezes in and orders his bewildered staff to suspend the laws of gravity and make water run uphill.

It would be doubly wrong, in such a circumstance, to then sack his most senior civil servant because the hapless official had pointed out the very real practical difficulties with the plan, suggested an impact assessment and perhaps a few pilot schemes to see how the reversal of Newtonian physics and long-standing scientific orthodoxy (“stale” to some) might pan out in the real world.

That, however, seems to be what’s happening with the arrival in the Treasury of Kwasi Kwarteng, a man not obviously lacking in self-confidence. Just like that, with a flick of his ministerial fingers, like a character out of Lewis Carroll, Mr Kwarteng has decreed that the UK is to return to an economic growth rate of 2.5 per cent per annum, and that nothing else matters. Shades of the Queen of Hearts.