Careless talk costs credibility – a point that politicians who like musing aloud about undesirable outcomes should bear in mind.
A lower tax burden will be impossible without less supply of government. And for there to be less supply, there must first be less demand.
Perhaps all he could do today was seek to protect the Government from the markets. But there wasn’t much sense of a coherent strategy to deliver a win – either economic or political.
The harsh lesson of the Truss premiership is that Hunt’s mission isn’t to strike a judicious balance between not spooking the markets and not intensifying the recession. It’s not to spook the markets. Period.
He rejects “other allegations about my past conduct…but I recognise these are becoming a distraction for the good work this government is doing for the British people”.
Britain is committed to achieving Net Zero by 2050. Sunak pledged to make us self-sufficient in energy by 2045. But wouldn’t hitting the last target mean missing the first – if we were ever going reach it anyway?
Over and above his future hangs a bigger question – namely, whether holding Ministers properly to account is the same thing as pile-ons by the media pack.
The Government is only part of the way to a coherent asylum policy. To complete the journey, it would have to go where Sunak pointed, and leave the Refugee Convention.
It’s possible that the Conservatives’ reputation won’t recover for many years from the combined impact of recent events. All that can be said so far is that the sense of direction is positive.
“It’s simply a reality that all phones – including government ones – are easily hacked,” a Minister told me. “The difference with government phones is that they’re regularly tracked so we know about it sooner when it’s obvious – which it usually isn’t.”
These are coherent changes which suggest that the Prime Minister will live or die in seeking to keep the Conservative 2019 electoral coalition alive.
The new Prime Minister must carry out one of the most difficult shuffles in modern times amidst an international crisis following internal convulsions.
“I understand too that I have work to do to restore trust after all that has happened. All I can say is that I am not daunted. I know the high office I have accepted and I hope to live up to its demands.”
He is taking office during a profound economic crisis, in some ways equivalent to wartime, and needs a reshaping of the front bench to reflect the seriousness of the times.
Even were it otherwise, does she really want to follow where Truss trod? Perhaps win a ballot of party members – though that is far from certain – and try to govern with the support of a minority of Tory MPs?