Do you remember the deficit? There being “no money left”? All being in it together? Do you have a dim recollection of the time when Ed Miliband’s failure to mention government borrowing in a conference speech marked him as a man unfit to run the country? Well, we’ve got news for you: it was all nonsense.

Kwasi Kwarteng, this year’s third Chancellor of the Exchequer, rose in the House of Commons to tell us that we had entered a “new era”. Deficits are now a good thing. The bigger the better! Bigger deficits lead to smaller deficits! Which are also good!

The chamber was full, but not packed. There were some familiar faces in unfamiliar places: there on the backbenches were Dominic Raab, Sajid Javid and Oliver Dowden. There was no sign of Rishi Sunak or Boris Johnson.

On the frontbench, the Chancellor was giving us the bad news. “Growth is not as high as it should be,” he said. We were in a “vicious cycle of stagnation”. The good news was that this was all in the past. Britain’s wicked, failing Conservative government has been replaced by a bold new government of Conservatives. Gone are losers like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss, and in their place we have visionaries like Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg!

The Labour benches opposite were loving it all, laughing and pointing as Kwarteng denounced his party’s failures. There were ironic cheers when Kwarteng, whose party has been in power since 2010, said it would be difficult to turn things around “overnight”, and when he told them that “fiscal responsibility remains essential”. When he said he was going to repeal tax rules introduced in 2017 and 2021, Labour’s Anneliese Dodds marked these reversals of reversals by waving her arms back and forth like they were windscreen wipers.

A tall, broad man, Kwarteng gripped the dispatch box with both hands, leaning into it slightly as though straining to read his speech. He would trail off towards the end of his sentences before briefly speeding up again, as though someone had forgotten to plug him in to charge overnight.

Elsewhere in the chamber, the mood was testy. As Kwarteng explained that the trouble with the country’s welfare system was that it was just too generous, Labour’s Chris Elmore heckled him from behind the Speaker’s chair. Tory Jonathan Gullis, standing nearby, didn’t like that, and the pair began arguing, jabbing fingers’ in each other’s direction.

At the despatch box, Kwarteng said he was cancelling a planned rise in corporation tax. This is red meat to Conservatives, and a lot of them cheered, but a surprisingly large number didn’t. On the rear rows of the backbenches, there were worried faces. They were like passengers on a flight who’ve just heard that the pilot has been replaced, and the new guy has come on the intercom to explain that he’s got an interesting theory about gravity that he’s always wanted to test.

Because that was what Kwarteng was announcing, a test run of ideas that have bounced around the on the wilder fringes of the right for years. Cutting taxes increases revenues! The more you cut, the more you get! Though Kwarteng didn’t explain why, if this was all such a good idea, he shouldn’t simply abolish tax altogether, meaning that revenues would rise overnight to a gazillion bajillion pounds.

They were like passengers on a flight who’ve just heard that the pilot has been replaced

He has other theories, too. Are bankers moving to Paris? It’s because of the tax rates, and not any other recent British policy decisions related to the European Union. Is the pound going through the floor? It’s because financial markets don’t understand economics. He will be vindicated.

There would be a certain amount of Tory criticism of all this when Kwarteng finished, about his refusal to publish forecasts and the contradiction between his efforts to boost growth and the Bank of England’s moves to raise interest rates. As worrying for the Chancellor was the shortage of allies.

At the end of his statement Conservative MPs deserted the chamber, leaving him facing the opposition. He went 40 minutes without a single supportive question from his own side. It was an echo of what we used to see whenever Boris Johnson came to the chamber to explain why he wasn’t sorry about his not-parties: the party deserting its leadership.

But first, we were waiting for the traditional crowd-pleasing rabbit out of the hat. “I have another measure,” Kwarteng told us. Here it came, the moment he would surprise Labour with a bold move that they wouldn’t be able to criticise. Kwarteng … drum roll …  said he was going to abolish completely the highest tax band. Behind him, Tories were too stunned to respond. He had decided to borrow £2 billion a year in order to make half a million of the country’s richest people a little bit richer. Next to him Truss looked at Labour smugly. They hadn’t seen that one coming, had they?

They hadn’t. But Truss has a theory too, that all that stuff over the years from David Cameron about middle class voters and from Theresa May and Boris Johnson about working class voters was nonsense. In the Truss universe, what voters want is fracking and foie gras and tax cuts for the very rich. They will cheer as mortgage bills rise and the pound sinks, because they will recognise that just as you have to cut taxes to raise revenue, you have to get poorer to be richer. Down is up. Big is small. Cold is hot. Borrowing is saving. Trussonomics, baby!