Truss thinks she’s making U-turns – but she’s driving straight into a wall

When you somehow contrive to create a situation in which the only hope you give people is the hope of a U-turn, that is, quite literally the end of the road, writes Tom Peck

How long can a government last, exactly, when the very best thing it can do for everyone, including itself, is the opposite of everything it wants to do?

Yes, we must report that the UK is having yet another one of those days, where things start going ever so slightly better for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, on the back of news slipping out that while they are obviously still clueless, they may be fractionally less malignant than was first thought. And that is as good as it gets.

The near extermination of people’s pensions have made said people overnight experts in the gilt markets, which turn out to be rather easier to understand than was first anticipated. The gilt rate is the price at which people are willing to lend money to the UK government. When it goes up, it’s because they’ve decided that lending to the UK is risky, so the recent soaring of the market reflects nothing more than a general view that the UK has gone even more mad, from its already mad starting position, which it certainly has.

But at this point, it appears to create even more problems when it goes down again. After Kwasi Kwarteng’s entirely mad budget, it was immediately and correctly understood that the UK had indeed gone mad. That it was borrowing money just to give it away again to rich people, and all this in a time of global financial chaos as well.

That was obviously mad, and as a consequence, Truss and Kwarteng have been faced with absolutely no choice but to slowly but certainly U-turn on as much of it as they can get away with. They U-turned on the tax break for millionaires bit, and that sent the how-mad-is-the-UK-government rate down a little bit.

On Thursday morning, it carried on going down. Why was this? Well, after Liz Truss addressed her own MPs, they wandered out of the meeting and instantly began an informal contest to see who could hand out the most damning anonymous quote about it. “We’re being given a choice between a s*** sandwich or a s*** sandwich extra s***,” said one (to LBC’s Andrew Marr).

“It was like watching someone trying to start a fire using a magnifying glass. Using damp wood. In the dark,” said another (to the Daily Mail).

Someone else just breezily announced that it had been “funereal.”

All this is good news on the How-Mad-Is-The-Government scale, because the quotes were so uniquely damning that potential lenders to the UK government would have had little choice to conclude that the entirely mad government is about to be kicked out, and will therefore get less mad (though it could of course get more mad).

On Thursday afternoon, this carried on. Government sources let it be known to the usual places that it was probably going to have to do the opposite of what it said it was going to do, and raise corporation taxes after all. At this point, the How-Mad-Is-The-Government index plummeted further. It seemed like maybe the government was going to do the non-mad thing, face its humiliation and bring an end to its madness.

Which it almost certainly is, but not yet. In Washington DC, Kwasi Kwarteng was asked whether he was going to put corporation tax up, as he had promised not to do, and all he could say was “the position hasn’t changed,” followed by “we are committed to the growth plan.”

This wasn’t a yes, but it also wasn’t a no. And stopping short of an outright denial of his intention to U-turn is the best you can hope for (because they’re not just mad, they’re also breathtakingly arrogant).

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It’s a strange place to be, isn’t it? Everyone’s lives get a little bit safer, a little bit more secure, when it’s suspected that their actual government won’t go through with its insane plans. But the actual government is also too proud, too immensely self-regarding to actually admit that’s what it’s going to do, and instead will only say that you have to “wait until 31 October”, which is when Kwasi Kwarteng intends to make another statement, mainly about how bad his last statement was.

It’s absurd, of course it is, but it’s the same magic cocktail as before. Staggering economic incompetence that is then surpassed by even greater political incompetence. When everyone can see how badly you’ve cocked everything up, it is not good politics to then refuse to admit you’ve done anything wrong, while trying to quietly undo the damage and hope no one will notice.

There’s no escape from this. Course there isn’t. When you somehow contrive to create a situation in which the only hope you give people is the hope of a U-turn, that is, quite literally the end of the road. There’s absolutely nowhere to go, and that’s where they’re going, fast.