Sunday night in the Malmaison Birmingham hotel, and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng looked uncharacteristically subdued.
Hours earlier, he had shown the Prime Minister a draft of his speech for the following day, in which he intended to vow – in the teeth of furious opposition – to ‘stay the course’ on the Government’s controversial plans to axe the 45p top rate of income tax.
Yet there were already signs that the policy might be doomed.
Kwarteng had, in truth, been growing increasingly frustrated. In his mini-Budget just nine days earlier, he had frozen the country’s energy bills at a cost of perhaps £65billion, promised to reverse his predecessor Rishi Sunak’s hated hike to national insurance and even to cut a penny off the basic rate of income tax. Each of these would help ordinary people, not millionaires.
And yet all the media and Opposition could talk about was the decision to abolish the 45p rate for those earning £150,000 and above. The policy might cost perhaps…
