Are the Tories in the business of managing decline?

Kwasi Kwarteng’s speech to Tory conference was an attempt to get his party back behind him after his U-turn on the 45p rate. He acknowledged it a number of times in his address, opening by saying it had been a ‘tough’ day, but insisted that the government needed to keep going. The members in the hall laughed as he referred to ‘a little turbulence’ and insisted that ‘we are listening’.

After the U-turn, it was quite audacious to insist the government had an ‘iron commitment’ to anything, but his commitment today was to ‘fiscal discipline’ and the ‘central and guiding mission’ of the government to grow the economy. It was an attempt to reassure colleagues that they could and should stick with the other policies he was pursuing. But in his list of the things that would achieve this growth lay the clues of what was going to cause trouble next.