Politics

Yes, but why did the IMF put out its Tuesday night statement? Even if all its criticisms of the government’s new economic policy were correct, why the rush? The IMF’s action is insulting to a G7 country and premature because its thoughts were inevitably composed without full knowledge. It is best seen as part of a pattern, like the early attempts to reverse Brexit, or the US government’s related interventions over the Northern Ireland Protocol. The people who have been running the developed world badly for more than two decades resent those who now challenge them. They pick their moments. The coup de grâce to Boris Johnson earlier this year

What’s the sign of a successful Budget? Chris Philp, the new chief secretary to the Treasury, gave his answer moments after Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s statement last Friday: a strong pound. ‘Great to see sterling strengthening on the back of the new UK growth plan,’ he tweeted out. A (temporary) rising pound made sense to Truss supporters, who argued that markets would support their transition to a lower-tax, higher-growth economy. This was, they thought, their vindicating moment. The moment didn’t last. Within minutes, the pound had entered a steep descent and UK borrowing costs surged. But Kwarteng is not a politician who panics. Instead of staying in the office and trying

Vice-chancellor Stephen Toope claims it was ‘inevitable’ that a university ‘as long-established as Cambridge’ would have links to slavery. Now that faculties gorge on racial guilt as Cambridge dons once famously feasted on roasted swans, what was really inevitable is that a body christened ‘The Advisory Group on the Legacies of Enslavement’ would find links to slavery. Why, it must have frustrated the authors of the report released last week that their three-year inquiry didn’t manage to dredge up any evidence that the university ever directly owned slaves or plantations. Rather, it’s the money that was tainted; lucre having always passed through dirty hands somewhere along the line, there’s no