When Kwasi Kwarteng claimed his budget-busting growth plan would usher in a "new era," it was unlikely he had in mind a crash in sterling, skyrocketing mortgage rates and a 33-point poll lead for Keir Starmer.
But in seven nerve-wracking days, Kwarteng and Liz Truss' bold economic experiment, gleefully celebrated by free market think tanks, was comprehensively destroyed.
After Friday's historic testimony, Kwarteng was relaxed enough to take his advisors to a Whitehall pub and pose for selfies with the landlady. Late this week, he struggled to find spending cuts to add to his totals in the face of rising borrowing costs, while telling reporters, "We are sticking to the growth plan".
Kwarteng's aides insist he remained consistently calm when his cherished plan got a kicking from the markets. But as the Conservative Party conference gets underway in Birmingham this weekend, many of the chancellor's colleagues are anything but relaxed.
Much of last Friday's plan consisted of policies that were heavily pursued in Liz Truss' leadership campaign. But the pair opted for more costly and controversial measures, including scrapping the 45 pence cap and removing bonuses for bankers.
Overall, it was the largest tax cut package in 50 years and came on top of the radical energy price guarantee: the emergency response to gas prices that had skyrocketed due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which Kwarteng and Truss had decided to fully finance by borrowing it and could raise up to 150 billion. £ cost.
Truss's supporters among right-wing commentators reacted with growing fury to each new voice condemning her plans, with Tory peer Lord Frost saying they were part of the "international intimidation classes" – a group he counted the Economist, the Financial Times and the former bank governor Mark Carney and, improbably, Gordon Brown.
As the gilt sell-off continued through Wednesday, the vicious rise in yields, which had already surged in recent months, wreaked havoc on pension funds. Faced with the risk that panic selling of bonds would create a self-fulfilling "doom loop," and with some funds warning that they were in danger of actually becoming insolvent, the bank rushed to the rescue.
Threadneedle Street announced it would buy Gilts, promising to do so for up to a fortnight in up to 65 billion of stock of bonds in a process known as "quantitative tightening".
The Bank's action actually put a floor under the government bond market; but also emphasized the seriousness of the situation. Kwarteng and Truss, meanwhile, were nowhere to be seen, hiding behind the convention that Labour would get a clear run during their conference week.
The prime minister finally emerged from her self-imposed purdah Thursday morning with a series of interviews with local BBC radio – the traditional warmup for the Tory conference. Excited about the market chaos, she tried to focus on the generosity of the energy rescue, but seemed to falter when challenged about the housing market, pausing repeatedly before responding. mortgage interest rates, it suggested that the bank's matter be.
Labour's deputy leader, Angela Rayner, joked that Truss had "finally broken her long painful silence with a series of short painful silences".
With movements in gilt yields alone adding 18 billion to the government's interest bill. £ per year, pressure on Kwarteng to make spending cuts to make his plans work increased, according to calculations by the Resolution Foundation.
Asked whether he would make good on Rishi Sunak's promise that benefits for some of society's poorest people would be increased in line with inflation next spring, he said it was "premature for me to make a decision on that".
However, the public already seems to have come to its own decision about Truss and Kwarteng's plans. A series of damning polls released Thursday night all showed Labour dramatically widening its lead – with the 33-point margin identified by YouGov hinting at an electoral wipeout for the Tories.
By Friday morning, Truss's professed distaste for "abacus economics" – as she described her leadership rival Sunak's approach – was apparently forgotten as she and Kwarteng hosted senior OBR figures for a cozy chat at Nr. 10 invite.
By the end of the week, a semblance of calm had returned to the city, and the battered pound was able to regain some of its value. But as the Tory conference gets underway this weekend, many of their colleagues fear that the "new era" of Kwarteng and Truss will be one in which their own party is swept ignominiously from power.