The Blame Game: who crashed the pound?

I confess. I’m feeling a bit like the third viola player on the deck of the Titanic. I should really be playing something upbeat for this week’s column, but I can’t ignore the fact that I’m currently sliding across a deck listing at 45 degrees.

Yes, I’m already on the whisky and I don’t normally drink. But here we are at End of Days… again… with a whole new crisis to unpick and a new draft of outlier opinions to judge against the consensus. Last time it was professors of epidemiology vs some errant PhD with a theory to sell. Now we’re weighing up the opinions of professors of economics, former Bank of England chiefs, and advisors to presidents, against fast-talking hedge fund chancers.

It might not, then, be a good time to look at these things too objectively – just a moment as I open a new bottle – but we can at least enjoy the ride. Salut!

So… Do you want to hear a good one?

Lord Ashcroft, former Deputy Chairman of the Tory Party, tweeted out an anecdote on Wednesday morning that didn’t just take the biscuit. It gobbled it down and then greedily reached for the rest of the packet. “A currency trader has just told me that a driver to sell sterling was not just the mini-budget”, he wrote, “but a concern that Labour could form the next Government…”

Wrap your brain around that one, if indeed your brain has the flexibility of Simone Biles around a parallel bar. It’s a high-level logical puzzle and makes the whole debate about chickens and eggs seem like a childish riddle (the answer is “egg”, obviously!)

And why might Labour soon be in power? Truss has (or perhaps it might be more accurate to now write “had”) two years to set out her bun stall. The only reason why Labour might form the next government (at this rate, probably by the middle of next week) is that our new Prime Minister failed to ride a bounce in the polls. She told us she wasn’t afraid to be unpopular and there was no way to be more unpopular than by choosing to crash the economy. The writing is surely on the wall and put there by the IMF who issued an unprecedented warning, described by Ed Conway on Sky, as “the kind of statement one normally expects to hear about an emerging economy facing a current account crisis”.

Yet Ashcroft is not alone in telling Specsavers he wanted the rose-tinted lenses. The last few days have seen quite a few attempts to defy economic gravity, with some pundits rocking so hard on their heels they’re throwing punches like the boxer with the tweety birds spinning around their heads. Forget about the economics – easy to do if, like me, you’ve never hedged a fund, gambled on the pound, or moved your assets to the Bahamas – and just consider the politics as they orbit this crisis. The efforts being put into hammering a square block into a round hole have been something to witness.

This is a symptom of the grander malaise that has weakened our politics for a decade or more. Debates are no longer sensible, mistakes owned, victories nuanced. This is the politics of the grandstand. “You crashed the pound! You crashed the pound!” chant the supporters in red and those in blue sing about Tony Blair and Iraq, or Gordon Brown and an old lady, or the evil 49% who quite liked the world as it was before we all began to worry about chip oil. Contrarianism is now established as a chief dynamic in our politics.

It is sadly also polluting our commentary, which slides too easily between the objective and the subjective. Too many of our politicians are journalists and journalists are politicians. Boris Johnson was, of course, the ultimate “client journalist” (a term that Google suggests only came into usage since about 2009). This is really what we’ve been witnessing with these defences of the so-called “KamiKwasi budget” (extra whisky for whoever coined that one!). For all the talk of populism being a response to inside-the-bubble politics, politics has never been so insular, where comment and policy are cojoined like the Rod of Asclepius.

Leading up to Truss’s victory, there was considerable focus on where her economic ideas came from, chiefly Patrick Minford who has been quite vocal in defending the chancellor. Writing in The Telegraph he said: “There is no sterling crisis, except in the mind of idiots”. Over in The Sun, he’s been even more upbeat. “It will make our exports cheaper and force us to rethink our energy supply policy […] Sun readers will be among the winners.”

Well, of course, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Lord Frost meanwhile has been busy setting the clock back by about 15 years. “Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are rightly focused on delivering this and they should tune out the criticism from those who are still in the intellectual world of Gordon Brown.”

I guess we should just be thankful it wasn’t the Remainers who got the blame for the run on the pound.

But, hang on! Here’s Crispin Odey, the hedge fund manager, who clearly hates to disappoint. “Remainers are to blame for the run on the pound” he claims.

Drink another shot if you had that on your card. In fact, just drink another shot. We all need it.

Again, this is no analysis of what’s really going on here. All I know is that we were sailing along on a bright moonlit night on a relatively calm ocean, there was a sudden bump, and then people started throwing their loved ones in lifeboats. There are books ready to be written about the events of the past week and it’s unlikely they’ll ever get to the bottom of what happened, mired as it is in the personalities of Truss and Kwarteng, the fragility of markets in a world coping with a lingering pandemic, a war in Ukraine, and the madness of the man in the Kremlin.

But when those books are written, it’s unlikely that any will conclude that it was Kier Starmer, Gordon Brown, or even the nebulous entity known as “Remainers” who are to blame for the current crisis. But here in the moment, as people tell us to stop panicking, it’s obvious why scapegoats are needed. In fact, why stop there? This wouldn’t be a raging idiotic culture war if they can’t also blame Guardian readers, Antifa, and, of course, the trans community… Add to that list the Bank of England. And, let’s face it, nobody is so foolish as to want to defend them!