Presentation is everything. Or, at least, almost everything.
Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng weren’t wrong to argue that the UK needed to escape its low growth-no growth cycle. But the way they went about it was wrong. And that was their downfall.
Entrepreneurs see a gap in the market and try to fill it. Liz and Kwasi, being the team of restless political entrepreneurs that they are, argued that the same-old economic same-old, was a road to nowhere. What they wanted to do was to break the UK’s chain of low productivity and economic mediocrity. However, by not sharing their plans with the Cabinet beforehand or inviting the Office of Budget Responsibility into their boudoir, all prior to announcing their tax cutting, deficit financing plan, they were always asking for trouble.
It wasn’t that they hadn’t been warned. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ argued Sun-Tzu, the author of The Art of War. But not explaining their strategy with their parliamentary colleagues or the OBR beforehand, turned out to be a book-one page-one error, which gave every ambitious Tory Minister and every scribbler from Fleet Street to Wall Street, licence to crow or print. Margaret Thatcher, not exactly a shy retiring violet when it came to implementing major economic upheavals, wouldn’t have fallen into that bear trap, often telling those both within and beyond earshot, ‘you can’t buck the market.’
One of the probable consequences of Liz and Kwasi being turfed out of office so soon is that we are now likely to be heading for a few years of managed decline, comprising higher taxes, lower spending and economic contraction. It’s not exactly going to get the electorate jumping for joy, is it? I just hope that in attempting to cure the UK’s high debt, low growth disease, our new Chancellor and PM don’t end up killing the patient.
Chancellor Kwasi’s error was not only naïve, but surprising too. After all, he is apparently one of the cleverest MPs in Westminster: a scholarship to Eton; a double first and a PhD from Cambridge; a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard and someone who apparently writes poetry in Latin. It’s a pity though that he couldn’t read the tea leaves before presenting his Budget.
To give them some credit, JFK would have understood Liz and Kwasi’s restlessness. ‘Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth,’ he said. But, when you want to implement a high wire act, you have to plan ahead, and carefully. Otherwise, to use an army maxim, ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’. We will probably never know whether Kwarteng and Truss’s financial gymnastics would have succeeded, but it was a very badly implemented strategy. And, as even President Clinton, who often had his mind (and other parts of his anatomy) elsewhere, recognised that ultimately, ‘it’s the economy stupid.’