Kwasi Kwarteng is dispensing with ‘experts’ for next week’s mini-Budget

The chancellor will be doing the equivalent of trying to land a plane in fog having turned off the radar, writes John Rentoul

What makes this more incomprehensible is that the Truss-Kwarteng plan may well be the right policy for the wrong reasons (REUTERS)

Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, is going to deliver a financial statement in parliament next week, squeezed between the Queen’s funeral and the Labour Party conference. His people say it will be “limited in scope”, repeating the plan to freeze energy prices announced by the prime minister last week and announcing the tax cuts that she promised during the Conservative leadership campaign.

It will be a statement of self-belief by our new government, because Kwarteng has sacked Sir Tom Scholar, the top Treasury civil servant, and he has refused to ask the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) for its forecasts of the economy and the effect of the new policies on it.

Sir Tom was popular in the Treasury and experienced; his abrupt departure has provoked outrage from the mandarin class. Lord Macpherson and Lord O’Donnell, his predecessors, have protested. Even if civil servants are out of tune with a new government, they are usually given a little time to be put to the test.