The moment when the Tory benches transformed into three full rows of the gnashing teeth emoji

No one can know what spending cuts the government has got planned. They can only know that the prime minister both is and isn’t going to go ahead with them

Having accidentally detonated the economy because she didn’t understand what she was doing, you would, by this point, hope that the prime minister might have learned that the words that come out of her mouth are of immense significance.

On Tuesday, the Bank of England intervened, for a second time, to protect people’s pensions from the government’s actions and it certainly chose its own words with great care.

“Dysfunction in the market, and the prospect of self-reinforcing ‘fire sale’ dynamics, pose a material risk to UK financial stability,” it announced, while announcing it was going to have to buy up even more government bonds than it had hoped.

You probably don’t need to be the world’s greatest expert in the bond markets to understand that the phrase “self-reinforcing ‘fire sale’ dynamics” suggests that things might have become somewhat suboptimal.

They’ve become suboptimal for one reason – and one reason which the government continues to deny. It thinks it doesn’t have to bother making any of its numbers add up, because it’s just going to “grow” the economy (mainly by just saying the word “growth” over and over again), and make all of the problems go away.

But it doesn’t work like that. If you borrow a load of money just to give it away again, then the financial markets, and normal people, will think you’ve gone quite mad, which to be fair to the prime minister, isn’t quite true. She hasn’t gone mad. She already was mad, it’s just that the Tory party were too consumed by their now multi-faceted civil war to notice.

It means that the people whose decisions move the financial markets are heavily invested in what the government has got to say, because they are trying to understand what on earth is going to happen, because none of it makes sense.

Absolutely everybody has worked out that if you’re refusing to reverse any of your mad tax cuts (apart from the one just for millionaires, which was politically suicidal but economically fairly irrelevant), then they can only be paid for with public spending cuts.

Which means that, when it comes to Prime Minister’s Questions, and the prime minister is asked if she can rule out any “reductions in public spending”, and she replies “absolutely”, there will be – and indeed there was – a very sharp intake of breath.

The air seemed to be sucked out the doors. The Tory benches instantly transformed into three full rows of the gnashing teeth emoji. If the markets are eating your country’s economy alive, jacking up government borrowing rates because they’re starting to see you as a liability, one thing you don’t really want to do is stand up at the setpiece moment of the political week, and issue a steely, one word confirmation – just so everybody can be absolutely, doubly sure – that you definitely haven’t got a clue what you’re doing.

If there’s to be no public spending cuts, and no reversal to the tax cuts, there’s going to be more wing and prayer desperation, more refusing to acknowledge that nothing adds up and hoping no one will notice even though they most certainly will.

Later, Chris Philp would be at the despatch box to explain that, actually, while there would be no cuts to public spending, there would be “iron discipline”. This, it has been assumed, implies that there will actually be massive cuts, but which technically won’t be real because they won’t necessarily add up to more than the enormous, one-off energy bill bailout.

But no one can really know for sure, because the government has stopped answering even the simplest of questions. On the Today programme on Wednesday morning, Jacob Rees-Mogg was asked whether the government was in any way responsible for having spooked the markets. He replied by saying that the mere question was evidence of “BBC impartiality” – quite possibly the stupidest remark uttered by any government minister in the last decade.

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So, at the time of typing, no one quite knows what the government’s intentions are, and quite possibly, that’s how they like it. They still can’t give a straight answer to whether benefit payments will rise in line with earnings or inflation, and are likely to publicly argue about it for another month or so, looking ever more ridiculous.

And when, in the end, they have to do it by the more generous measure, because it’s the only one that makes sense, they will get credit for it, having spent more than a month advertising that meanness was their preferred option if they could have got away with it.

On Tuesday, they let it be known they were planning to scrap legislation to ban no-fault evictions. On Wednesday, they announced they weren’t doing that.

No one can know what spending cuts they’ve got planned. They can only know that the prime minister both is and isn’t going to go ahead with them. She isn’t going to go ahead with them, because that would look bad at Prime Minister’s Questions. But she is going to go ahead with them, because to not do so would look bad when the government has to give a statement on quite how it managed to get the economy into such a staggering mess in such a short space of time.

Whatever answer will get you through the next few seconds will have to do – a familiar point reached by many, if not all, previous Tory prime ministers. But you’re really not meant to get there quite this quickly.