Next week’s autumn statement will show if Jeremy Hunt has learned anything from George Osborne’s and Kwasi Kwarteng’s failures
A fool repeats his folly, the Old Testament suggests, in the same way that a dog returns to its own vomit. Kwasi Kwarteng seems determined to prove that this is true. On Friday he made two false claims about his short tenure at the Treasury. The first is that his 23 September mini-budget was not a cause of the government’s current financial woes. The second is that Liz Truss forced the pace on economic policy too hard during her brief period as prime minister, while Mr Kwarteng, even more briefly her chancellor, argued for a slower approach.
Neither claim stands up. No one pretends that the mini-budget is uniquely responsible for the high levels of UK public debt that are now being invoked as the justification for next week’s looming autumn statement. There are many other large causes, some of them global, like Covid and energy costs, and others closer to home, including Brexit. The mini-budget, though, made things even worse. It triggered a run on the pound, a lurch in gilts, a Bank of England buy-up emergency and a tightening of the mortgage market. It says a lot about Mr Kwarteng and Ms Truss’s doctrinaire wing of the Conservative party that, even now, they remain in denial about something the voters understand more clearly from their own experience than these discredited ministers ever did.
