Crash course: how the Truss revolution came off the road

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng wanted to shake things up. They were radicals in a hurry, keen to show that Britain was under new economic management. Theirs would be an unapologetic pro-growth agenda: no more genuflection in front of failed orthodoxies, no more being paralysed by fear or criticism. As a sign of this, they abolished the 45p tax rate for the highest earners: a move that many Tories longed to make, but did not dare. It seemed Truss and Kwarteng would leap in where other Conservatives feared to tread.

This lasted just ten days. As the tax plan was reversed and No. 10 licked its wounds, there was much talk of how scrapping the 45p rate didn’t really matter that much – just a £2 billion measure in a £100 billion budget, it had become a distraction and wasn’t the most economically important part of the package. But just as Truss and Kwarteng wanted to scrap it because it was totemic, so their retreat is totemic.

These revolutionaries have been forced to acknowledge the power of those political forces they had derided. They fought the law of politics and the law won. They have had to accept why five Conservative chancellors didn’t return the top rate to 40p where it was under Gordon Brown, and why George Osborne only cut it to 45p from 50p. Brown knew the new rate would raise hardly any tax, but he intended it as a political booby trap – any Tory who tried to dismantle it would be ensnared. So it has proven.

The party conference in Birmingham marked the dramatic end of the first phase of the Truss government. From now on, whenever her administration announces a radical policy, there will be a question over whether it will actually happen. ‘Every time they send us out to defend something controversial, we’ll be asking: why should we?’ says one MP.