The political naivete of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng has put the 'wets' back in charge - Bernard Ingham

The wets are back in command thanks, it has to be said, to the political naivete of Liz Truss and her now sacked Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, in their rush to make a splash by embarking on a bold new course of growth, growth, growth.

Unfortunately, they failed to prepare their party, which is running round like a headless chicken, and made two serious errors: tax cuts for the ‘rich’ during a cost-of-living crisis and failing to spell out how they proposed to balance the nation’s finances while piling more debt on top of the £400bn covid pandemic bill. This spelled certain trouble.

Nor shall we not get an inkling of their debt control plan for another fortnight, assuming – and this is a very big assumption – that Ms Truss lasts that long.

It is true that from 2010-20 a Tory Government acquired a reputation for ‘austerity’ in trying to eliminate Gordon Brown’s £153bn deficit legacy. But they had still not quite succeeded when the pandemic struck.

Hence, I suspect, Ms Truss’s emphasis on growth to cut debt and provide the wherewithal to carry out the much-needed reform of the UK.

It was altogether too much for her panicky party so we now have high taxation and an addiction to public spending.

Regardless of the huge covid bill, seemingly everybody wants to get their hands in the public till.

It is all reminiscent of the early Thatcher years when employers’ organisations went into No 10 calling for tax cuts and more ‘incentives’, apparently oblivious of the contradiction.

And so British politics is in a more febrile state than I have ever known.

I am singularly unimpressed with the ‘Bring Back Boris’ faction. Charismatic, if flawed, he may be. There is no one quite like him in politics today.

But a man who does not seem to know the value of money is not to be trusted with reducing more than £400bn of new debt on top of the £2.3 trillion (thousand billion) already round our necks.

Nor do I have much sympathy with the idea of installing ex-Chancellor Rishi Sunak as PM. This is not because he precipitated Boris’s demise.

It may be that Britain led the world out of the worst of the pandemic but Mr Sunak ran up the £400bn bill now found to be swollen by waste and fraud.

So, for the moment, we have the undoubtedly experienced but leadership reject, Jeremy Hunt, ruling the roost in the Treasury as Ms Truss’s ‘chief executive’.

He may be ‘a safe pair of hands’ but he is unexciting – some would say boring - and cautious to boot. He already seems to have calmed the markets. But can he restore the Tory Party to a semblance of sanity?

If he brings calm to stormy waters perhaps his suicidal party will then decide what it really stands for.

Is it a prudent, low tax, small and enabling government dedicated to economic freedom or just one that manages to keep its head above water and therefore presides over relative stagnation and national decline?

That is the last thing we need in a fraught world, living under the threat of nuclear war and the certainty of a communist takeover if we do not defend our free way of life.

And defence does not come cheap. It requires economic growth – and lots of it.

And there’s the rub. We are stuck with it because the Labour Party for the foreseeable future offers no alternative to decline even though Sir Keir Starmer is trying to recover it from Corbynista idiocy.

His is a thankless task when the Left-Moderate split never closes and when his paymasters, the unions, are doing their level best to make him unelectable by regularly disrupting public services with strikes.

They also seem to be as thick as two planks in looking after their members’ interests when the strike-ridden Royal Mail is to cut 10,000 jobs because of continuing losses.

You cannot strike your way to economic success. You just make matters worse for yourselves and the general public by trying to grab a bigger slice of a dwindling cake.

They should have learned that lesson from the economic chaos they caused in the 1970s through their abuse of power

The Tory Party is not alone in losing its marbles. God help us.