Full disclosure: I was an early supporter of Liz Truss for leader of the Conservative Party. I thought she would win, and I thought her team might offer me a job.

Only 50 per cent of this came true, but that passes for a brilliant track record these days. I remained an unpaid volunteer working from home on back-office admin. I did try to interest my colleagues in work I’d done on public spending reform, which seemed to be relevant. I didn’t press the point. I was more worried the new Government might be derailed by winter snowfall, and floods when it melted. There was no rush. Assembling an Autumn Budget would make it obvious that tax cuts required the new Chancellor to review expenditure … 

Well, it turns out that if you make an uncapped spending commitment to subsidise everyone’s energy bills, follow it up with significant tax reductions, whilst planning to keep other spending constant and declining to provide economic forecasts to support your claims about growth and inflation, then the chaps you expect to lend you the money are going to cut up rough.

Unsympathetic commentators have proclaimed the death of “unfunded tax cuts”, of “Thatcherism”, of indeed the Tory Party. It is impossible nowadays for any Conservative politician to advance without declaring admiration for Margaret Thatcher, especially since in practice they mainly reverse what she achieved. Liz Truss was not reticent at drawing parallels between herself and the Iron Lady. But this line of commentary betrays the same carelessness as the September “Growth Plan”.

The Government elected in May 1979 had the benefit of several years’ planning by the likes of Norman Strauss and John Hoskyns, and proceeded with what now looks like brilliant tactical patience (but was probably fudge and muddle). At a time, remember, of high inflation, the focus was on spending restraint, waiting for supply-side reforms to work. The reason those 364 economists attacked the March 1981 Budget was because it raised taxes during a recession. It did so because Ministers had identified an out-of-control deficit, i.e. higher than expected borrowing, as triggering many of the economy’s problems. Blockbuster tax cuts were delayed until the ninth year in power.

After 18 days of study, Kwasi Kwarteng presumably concluded that, on paper, the additional borrowing his “Growth Plan” required did not look excessive. He may have persuaded himself he was copying Howe’s June 1979 Budget, which also made net tax cuts whilst saddled with an expensive spending commitment (the Clegg Commission’s recommendations on public sector pay).

Liz Truss is more correctly appraised as a product of that failed system

But, as Gerald Ratner could have told him, it’s all about timing.

The real parallel to the September Half-Budget is not 1979, but something from a few years before. Kwasi Kwarteng abolishing the 45 per cent income tax rate and bankers’ bonus cap was our equivalent of the Sex Pistols going on early evening TV and using the F-word. It’s a measure of how life has changed that Kwarteng could have used as much foul language as he liked without disturbing anyone — would probably have received praise — but to cause real outrage he had to indicate unconcern at income inequality. That may have been the objective.

Punk music has been described as the product of people who feel an urge to express themselves musically whilst lacking any discernible musical talent. That’s harsh. Although it’s difficult to deny that most punks were motivated by no more than a childish desire to shock the grown-ups, the bland, complacent, sub-optimal sludge that constituted life in 1970s Britain did need an energetic kick up the backside and a jolt of something genuine. We used to wear beige tank-tops, you know. The electricity didn’t work. Neither did most of the workers.

The drawback is that putting a safety pin through your nose and glue in your hair isn’t a terribly constructive solution to these problems. The irony is that, thanks to the punk experience, the high value placed on “raw authenticity” and the right to offend other people’s sensibilities are fundamental bedrocks of the bland, complacent, sub-optimal sludge that constitutes life in 2020s Britain. Let’s see how long the electricity lasts this winter.

Punk Toryism, consciously or otherwise, is what Liz Truss offered. (It’s a bizarre fact that over the summer, John Lydon endorsed Jacob Rees-Mogg for Prime Minister.) Now, she has time to reflect on the harsh truth that the surrounding “bollocks” is just as important as any substance. Smashing the system doesn’t save it. There’s a reason why people take music lessons.

The rest of us should ponder the unpleasant fact that she had a point. The system isn’t working. Rather than an incompetent iconoclast, Liz Truss is more correctly appraised as a product of that failed system.

Our present disappointments arise from the conjunction of three related and reinforcing failures: our machinery of government is unfit for purpose; our political culture has been degraded; and we suffer an absence of strategic leadership.

Incredibly, there has been no comprehensive review of the machinery of government since Edward Heath in 1970. He asked the right questions, but supplied mainly wrong answers. “Thatcherism” privatised some functions and tried to streamline, but not fundamentally restructure, the remnant. Succeeding Prime Ministers reversed any improvements by pursuing ill-conceived management fads and crackpot goals. In many ways, we still have the Whitehall that Clement Attlee left us.

There was simply no need to publish a Half-Budget at that time

Election campaigns inevitably elevate party leaders as quasi-presidential figures, and complaints about over-mighty Prime Ministers date back to Walpole. However, in the 1990s there was a misguided transplant into Westminster of US campaigning techniques. Triangulation and spin applied to a constituency system reduces MPs to mere legal necessities, parroting soundbites manufactured by HQ, contracting the range of political debate. Carried into government, these techniques promote short-term news management over long-term planning. Downing St has ballooned into a West Wing-style shadow government, second-guessing departments and breaking down through overload. Ministers, relegated to glorified sales reps, are too undermined to run their departments effectively. When one of them lands the top job, they don’t know what to do. Living in the moment, politicians can neither see ahead nor remember the past.

At the 2016 referendum the electorate binned what we might call the National Strategy of the UK, a consensus across (most of) the political class that our future relied on the EU. We are waiting for someone to devise a replacement. We still suffer the after-effects of a complacent mindset in which EU membership was an inherent end-in-itself, with the Big Questions decided collectively at Brussels and no state formulating its own policy. Our leaders have not been trained to think and act strategically, and most remain stuck on a slow learning curve.

Government is gripped by a political-inflationary complex. Without fundamental management reform — irrespective of the motives of the doubtless wonderful civil servants employed — we are doomed to follow a direction-less spiral of ever-more wasteful expenditure and ever-under-performing services. Electoral reform is irrelevant. Changing the voting system for the shareholders’ meeting will not turn around a failing company.

Credit where it’s due, the premise of the ill-fated “Growth Plan” was that the UK needed to try something different. But note its limitations. Economic growth by itself is an objective, not a strategy. Real growth requires greater productivity, but supply-side reforms were sketched only vaguely — and it is by no means clear the parliamentary Tory Party would pass them. The Plan was launched without prior discussion by the Cabinet, or notifying the Bank of England (as a US administration publishes its Budget as an opening bid in negotiating with Congress).

Above all, there was simply no need to publish a Half-Budget at that time. Kwarteng could have waited until November and delivered a Full Budget with pages of supporting forecasts (and perhaps delay would have dampened ambition). If something had to be said, it could have been delivered without specific commitments, dressed up as a “consultation”, educating the markets as to what was coming.

The only reason I can see for announcing tax cuts on Friday, 23 September was to spike the Labour Party conference — in which case it represents the final, self-defeating apotheosis of the spin doctor’s dark art. The Grid was dictating the content as well as the timing of the Budget. Well, if so, they certainly achieved their objective of pushing Starmer off the TV. The impatient cult of the Decisive Leader seizing the headlines claims another victim. Hardly the launch of a new era, but it might serve as an epitaph for the way business has been done since 1997.

Is the vision of a low-tax economy now dead? When a teenager crashes a Ferrari into a brick wall, it doesn’t reflect badly on Italian sports cars. Or brick walls.

Are the Tories doomed? That depends whether a dissident faction succumbs to a fatuous “stab-in-the-back” myth. The Conservative Party possesses an immense ability to periodically self-destruct — and a surprising instinct for salvation by accident. In the grand scheme of things, Kwasi Kwarteng “getting his sums wrong” hardly matches, say, Anthony Eden botching an invasion of Egypt. The Tories picked a new leader then, and increased their majority at the next Election.

No outcome that turns on the views of forty million people in two years’ time is wholly inevitable. Anyone who wishes Rishi Sunak well could do worse than give him some books about Harold Macmillan for Christmas. Nobody would describe either man as a punk.