Barely a month in, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are in office but not in power - Andrew Vine

It takes a very special sort of talent to squander all political credibility on two separate occasions only 10 days apart, but that is the remarkable achievement of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.

Yesterday’s U-turn on abolishing the 45p top rate of tax demonstrated that the two people at the top of Government haven’t a clue what they are doing.

They lack any clear strategy for leading the country through the cost of living crisis or tackling rising inflation and interest rates that are going to wreck the household budgets of homeowners and exclude the young from the property market.

In an echo of the damning condemnation of John Major’s faltering government of nearly 30 years ago, Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng are in office but not in power.

They are adrift and being swept towards electoral disaster because of their own ineptitude, arrogance and wilful disregard of economic realities.

And because of their utter lack of competence, the country is adrift too. What is the Government’s economic policy?

Their only answer is that they’ll come up with something towards the end of November. This isn’t governing. It’s a farce, except there is nothing remotely funny about it.

Only 24 hours before the U-turn, Ms Truss was insisting the tax cut would stay as part of the dose of nasty economic medicine she had prescribed for the country.

No matter that massive borrowing to pay for it had sent the financial markets haywire, or that as a result the Bank of England had to spend £65bn to prevent pension funds from being bankrupted.

No matter that welfare payments for the poorest would have to be cut, or people on low wages would likely lose the benefits support that enables them to barely scrape by.

This was her innovative plan that tore up economic orthodoxy and would turbocharge the country. It was the only way, Ms Truss insisted.

The rumblings of her own MPs, who could see what she apparently could not – that her tax policy was electoral poison – has forced one of the most humiliating climbdowns in political memory.

Now, whatever she says in her conference speech tomorrow, one thing is glaringly obvious – her credibility with voters is shot. Nobody is going to forget that she wanted to enrich the wealthy at a point when millions are struggling and her cack-handedness made a difficult economic situation worse.

Here in the north, where incomes are lower than in the affluent Tory heartlands of the south, the squeeze on household budgets is going to be especially painful.

In less than four weeks – two of which had politics at a standstill because of the Queen’s death – Ms Truss has shattered her party’s long-treasured reputation for responsible stewardship of the public finances.

No wonder Labour are riding high in the opinion polls, with the greatest levels of voter approval since Tony Blair was the party’s leader.

Ms Truss is to Labour’s fortunes what Jeremy Corbyn was to the fortunes of the Tories before the 2019 election – a party leader incapable of convincing voters they are up to the job of running the country.

She cannot recover from this, and every halting, unconvincing interview in which she struggles to come up with answers to straightforward questions about what the Government is doing reinforces the impression that policy has not been thought through.

That was glaringly obvious from the lack of foresight over the likely consequences of the disastrous mini-budget. Hubris and generalities about going for economic growth have been substituted for clear and detailed policy.

It is an extraordinary, and unsettling, way to run the Government, especially when what the country required after the dishonesty and chaos of Boris Johnson was calm and competent leadership through the cost of living crisis.

The result will be paralysis in Government. There is obviously a substantial faction of Conservative MPs who believe Ms Truss is simply not up to the job, and are unwilling to see their seats sacrificed to idiot proposals that offend voters.

Once the Conservative conference is over, Ms Truss may sack the Chancellor in an attempt to save her own skin, but the damage to her own reputation is already done. Her fingerprints are all over the misguided tax cut and yesterday’s U-turn.

It is already too late for her. Premierships that start as badly as hers simply cannot be salvaged.