Britain needs an economic strategy – instead we’ve got Liz Truss | William Keegan

During a blissful holiday in the Vaucluse I managed to avoid any news about this dangerously absurd Conservative leadership election – that is, apart from one classic Truss gaffe.

Yes, the news that Liz Truss had declared that “the jury is out” on the UK’s future relations with France most certainly struck a dissonant chord with Kate McKinley, who runs the Mourchon winery in Séguret. She informed me of it with a despairing air, adding also that President Emmanuel Macron had reacted with the tolerance that has become his lot in matters of Anglo-French relations as long as the Brexiters reign over here.

However, the jury is certainly not out on Truss. She has condemned herself even before assuming the Tory leadership tomorrow. As a horseracing man, I feel I ought to remind readers that dead certainties do not always win – bookmakers at Ascot were offering 6-1 on a Labour victory the day before the 1992 election in which John Major triumphed. Nevertheless it looks as though Rishi Sunak will need divine intervention to reverse the odds now. By the way, it was not uninteresting that a week before that 1992 election a horse called Party Politics had won the Grand National.

To my mind both candidates are seriously misguided on many matters, but especially over continuing to support Brexit when it is such an obvious disaster: among other things, it is seriously eroding the nation’s tax revenues – which Truss and Sunak want to cut further (in Truss’s case, tomorrow!). It is such a disaster that the one and only Jacob Rees-Mogg wants to postpone the implementation of further border controls that are part of the Brexit “deal”.

The needless complications and bureaucratic consequences of Brexit are affecting and annoying more and more people, including many a Brexiter.

There are endless stories of customs delays and problems with renewing passports. My own contribution is this: to be sure of renewing her passport in time for our holiday, one of our daughters was told to go to Belfast. So we decided to make it a brief family visit to Belfast. Now, although Northern Ireland is feeling the squeeze of the cost of living crisis just like the rest of the UK, it is abundantly clear that, thanks to its continued membership of the customs union and the single market, it is suffering less, economically.

In fact, with due disrespect to the Democratic Unionist party and Truss, who want to break international law and disrupt the Northern Ireland protocol, I can report that my impression is that the majority of the people of Belfast are reasonably content with the deal that this ghastly Brexit government negotiated and now wants to rip apart.

One of my first duties on returning to London was to attend the funeral of an old friend, Jo Carey, a former Treasury official, who has died at the age of 88.

I mention this because Jo’s career was an interesting example of how the Treasury’s attitude towards “Europe” altered in the light of experience.

Having worked on International Monetary Fund matters in the 1960s – we had been rescued by the IMF in 1967, well before the more notorious rescue in 1976 – Jo and his Treasury colleagues knew all about the UK’s fundamental economic problems. They were also well aware of the argument that membership of the European Economic Community would improve our economic performance – which, indeed, it did.

However, the Treasury was for a long time suspicious of what it regarded as the Foreign Office’s excessive “European” enthusiasm. I recall on visits to Brussels in the early 1970s, when Jo was in the UK representation office, how often he and his Treasury colleagues were suspicious of initiatives hailing from the countries that became our European partners after we joined in 1973.

In the 1980s, Jo was the UK member of the court of auditors of the European Community, in Luxembourg, and he was prodigious in unearthing examples of blatant misuse – not to say corrupt use – of funds to which we, of course, had contributed.

However, Jo and his Treasury colleagues knew on which side the UK’s bread was buttered, not least after Margaret Thatcher’s championing of the single market. Indeed, one of the many aspects of Brexit that puzzle our former EU partners is how we can have left an organisation that was shaped to a considerable extent by the British.

Which brings us to memories of Harold Macmillan’s great remark: “Here we are, and the question is: where do we go from here?” Truss has not shared her strategic economic plans with us because she probably hasn’t any. And, God help us, it is down to the egregious Alexander Boris Johnson, who sacked all the sensible Remainer and Rejoiner members of his cabinet, that we are left with this bunch.