Even Conservative Party members are very unhappy with this government

From the ever-useful Conservative Home comes the news that the Tory membership is unhappy. About almost everything and everyone. This isn’t all that surprising; it mirrors the slump in Conservative support across the country as a whole, and the chaos of the last year. Strong and stable government underpinned by a parliamentary majority of 70-plus? If only.

But the extent of the disenchantment is still striking. You have to concede that the Conservative membership actually disowning their own government’s economic policy is quite a moment, even in these strange times. Some 49 per cent do not support the policy, against 42 per cent who back it, with around 9 per cent saying they don’t know (possibly too bewildered to answer).

Naturally, they hanker after the tax cuts and the sense of Tory principle they glimpsed all too briefly in the Truss-Kwarteng days. They wanted both tax cuts and public spending cuts, as Kwarteng tried to implement, rather than tax cuts and extra borrowing. Now they have all three, hence the discontent.