It’s not just salads going off during these unprecedented times

We are fairly certain that when writing The Walrus and the Carpenter, Lewis Carrol never imagined a time that we would talk about “lettuces and queens”. However, such is the strangeness of the post-Covid era that the headlines over the last quarter have been dominated by stories about the UK’s longest-reigning monarch and shortest-serving prime minister, both of whom, of course, shared the same first name. That they found the time to meet is another twist of fate, and perhaps a playwright will be tempted to frame a narrative around a dialogue between the striking contrast of permanence and ephemerality that these two women now represent.

There is a broader point here about the changing nature of the relationship between government and its population. One of the predictions that we made at the height of the pandemic was that the massive fiscal support and heavy regulation of the public would legitimate a significant expansion of the role of government in our day-to-day lives. This has been the pattern of the past 30 months, but we are seeing increasing evidence in financial markets that the credibility of government is starting to ebb away. Although the debacle of the Truss administration may be the most acute example of this phenomenon, it is hardly alone. Furthermore, the wrong lesson is at risk of being learned from the short-lived attempt to cut tax rates. This was not a rejection of laissez-faire economics by markets, but of inept leadership and fiscal abandonment.

“Even before Covid there was a shift taking place within public finance”