This is not the 1970s. Tory pledges to cut taxes are absurd

Sunak and Truss have no grasp of how low personal taxation is now - or how much a battered Britain needs public spending

Whenever I told him things were going from bad to worse, my father used to nod sagely and say: It was ever thus." However, I wonder what he would have said now about the state of the country and the governing" Conservative party.

In a leadership race whose inanity almost beggars belief, the two very rightwing contenders seem obsessed with establishing their Thatcherite credentials without, as far as I can see, having a clue what Thatcherism was really about.