During the Tory leadership contest, a recording that captured Liz Truss complaining that British workers lacked “skill and application” and needed “more graft” was leaked. This is the same Liz Truss who, just one month into her premiership, plunged the pound to an all-time low, forced the Bank of England into a £65bn intervention, and pushed the UK to the brink of a recession.

According to Truss, it was the performance of Kwasi Kwarteng, her then chancellor – and him alone – that was found wanting. She sacked him for implementing her own leadership pledges. Time will tell whether this is enough to save her career, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find an example of someone making a worse start to a new job and passing their probation.

Following their first U-turn, reversing plans to abolish the 45p tax rate for top earners, Truss and Kwarteng hoped we would mistake humiliation for humility: “We get it. We have listened.” If that were true, they would have heeded the warnings of those who told them from the very beginning that their experiment would fail. They wouldn’t have gambled with people’s livelihoods in the first place.

And they would have extended their U-turn to the swath of fiscal commitments that survived. It’s bad enough that they waited more than a week to reverse the cuts to corporation tax. It’s even worse that they still refuse to reverse their plans to uncap the bankers’ bonus, freeze benefits and slash public spending.

In my 39 years in parliament, I cannot remember a fiscal plan so reckless, arrogant and out-of-touch. More than one in five people – and one in three children – are in poverty in the UK. A quarter of a million people in England are homeless. This October, millions of people will struggle to heat