Just after 11pm last night I left a theatre and switched my phone back on to check who the Prime Minister was. A BBC news alert immediately arrived with a ping. “I’ll lead Tories into next election, says embattled Liz Truss.” So, we were clearly supposed to conclude: that was that. Of course, it isn’t. “I’m not going anywhere” is one of the most self-negating statements a politician can make: if you have to say it, and if the fact you did counts as news, then it probably isn’t true. At the moment last week when it started to seem all but certain that Kwasi Kwarteng would have to resign as chancellor normally apolitical radio stations like 6 Music began leading ...

It’s been three and a half weeks since the then-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng stunned British politics, and the financial markets, with a “mini-Budget” containing the biggest tax cuts since 1972. The scale of the chaos that has followed is painfully demonstrated by the fact that the now-chancellor Jeremy Hunt has just confirmed the biggest programme of tax rises since the early 1990s. Stable British economic policy is not. Budgets often unravel slightly in the days after they’re announced as specialists get to read the small print. But the mini-Budget unravelled almost immediately, in large part because Kwarteng chose not to produce any small print: the Office for Budget Responsibility was not asked to update its economic forecasts and the Treasury set out ...

Chaos is over; normal service is resumed. It’s the sort of televised message that marks the transition of power in states less stable and democratic than ours. The face of the new regime takes to the airwaves and explains in a stern but calm voice that all is well, there is no need for panic, order has been restored. The backdrop to Jeremy Hunt’s first broadcast as Chancellor was not as extreme as a coup, but its message was similar. In five minutes, straight to camera, he sought to smooth over the carnage of the mini-Budget and the sacking of his predecessor after just 38 days in the role. He was there to reassure the markets, and the British people, that ...

There is no economic experiment in recent history that has imploded as swiftly as Liz Truss’s. A six-week-old prime minister is now in office but not in power – and may soon not be in office either. Yet while Truss’s ideological crusade had disastrous results, there was a certain truth to her analysis.  The UK, as she repeatedly said, has been stuck in a low-growth rut for more than a decade. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the economy has expanded at an average annual rate of just 0.9 per cent (compared with 2.7 per cent before the crash). Of the G7 countries only Italy has fared worse. The UK’s living standards crisis – average real wages remain below their 2008 level ...

Ill-considered, juvenile “vandalism” by “philistine barbarians”. This was how critics sympathetic to the environmental cause described two young Just Stop Oil activists when they threw a can of tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh's famous sunflower paintings. But I have a niggling sense that Van Gogh would have embraced his newly soupy Sunflowers – and so should we. It’s important to clarify that the 134-year-old painting is unharmed. The National Gallery has confirmed there is minor damage to the frame but none to the painting, which is protected by a glass panel. Just Stop Oil campaigners have also confirmed to the New Statesman that those involved knew this to be the case. Safe, creative activism needs all the support it can get ...

The sacking of Kwasi Kwarteng, and the abject U-turn on corporation tax, has all the elements of farce. But when you consider the economic mess we're in, and the tangle of institutional responsibility that underpins the drama, it's not funny. On the face of it the government's mini-Budget fiasco is the product of ideology meeting market reality. Liz Truss and Kwarteng worked all summer, out of the earshot of civil servants, on an economic strategy based on free-market fantasy: the state's too big; high taxes strangle growth; hard Brexit is the route to salvation. The economic reality is that, since Brexit, Britain has had no coherent economic model. Trade has declined on all measures; the currency had lost nearly a third of ...

For years the Brexiteers have been in denial about the contradictions inherent to their project. Now they are coming out in the open. This week I heard from a reliable source that the Indian government was seething at Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, and quietly retaliating by making it harder for British tourists and business travellers to get visas for India. Braverman had told the Spectator her main aim was to lower the number of migrants coming to Britain and put the blame squarely on India. She had “some reservations” even over more visa flexibility for Indian students and entrepreneurs. “Look at migration in this country – the largest group of people who overstay are Indian migrants," she said. "We even reached an ...

There was drama this week as Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, doubled down on the Bank’s commitment to ending support for Britain’s pension funds by tomorrow (14 October). “We will be out by the end of the week,” he warned a gathering of the International Monetary Fund in Washington on Tuesday (11 October). The funds would have just “three days” left to restructure their operations and get out of the positions that had brought at least some to the brink of insolvency following Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget barely three weeks ago. The market reaction was immediate, the government’s borrowing rate instantly shooting upwards as traders processed the full import of Bailey’s comments. The Bank had promised to buy up ...