Liz Truss was bundled out of office, of course, in October 2022, becoming the UK’s shortest-serving Prime Minister in history. 

Measures in her “mini budget” were judged by practically the entire political and media establishment to have “crashed the economy” – not least given the subsequent sharp spike in government borrowing costs.

“That’s not true,” I wrote last June. “And claims it is risk sparking bond market turmoil and resulting economic chaos far worse than we saw in the autumn of 2022”.

I evoked “ghosts of the 1970s” in that June column because in 1976 Jim Callaghan’s Labour government pushed the UK economy off a cliff – with Britain enduring the ignominy of being rescued by the International Monetary Fund.

A generation of misguided and ideologically-driven industrial subsidies, soft-budget constraints and, above all, “spend to grow” hubris drove Britain into an insolvency cul-de-sac.

Financial markets – more specifically, the huge pension funds, insurance companies and other global institutional investors that lend governments money – had forced a fiscally incontinent Labour administration to go “cap in hand” to the IMF for a bailout.

“I’m not saying that will happen over the coming months,” I wrote last summer. “But the notion that it couldn’t because Truss and the Tories will be gone is reckless in the extreme”.

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