Alex Brummer

When Rachel Reeves raised employers' National Insurance in her first Budget last October, she said it was 'to raise the revenues required to fund our public services and to restore economic stability'.

Labour, which campaigned on a pledge to promote growth, has created a new era of 'stagflation' - a devastating combination of a flatlining economy and surging prices.

In Donald Trump's The Art Of The Deal, he wrote: 'The worst thing you can possibly do is seem desperate.' Never has this been more evident than over the past ten days in his approach to tariffs.

ALEX BRUMMER: There can be no greater example of Labour's naive attitude to growth and business than its refusal to back an investment on Merseyside by British pharmaceutical pioneer AstraZeneca.

The Chancellor yesterday tried to crawl out of the fiscal mire into which her own policies have swept her with a series of eye-catching pledges to boost growth.

ALEX BRUMMER: In a world where anti-Semitism is on the rise, we must remember that Auschwitz represents the apotheosis of such hatred and do all we can to stamp it out.

Liz Truss's short-lived premiership besides, I can think of few administrations that have come into power with such a belief in their own economic superiority only to come unstuck so rapidly.

How deceitful, how stale, Labour's election pledges look now. They promised the country change, growth and no tax increases for 'working people', however slippery that term was.

When finally disgorged from the crowded buses, we all had to lug our hand luggage through the rain, across the Tarmac, before climbing up steep steps to the plane.

ALEX BRUMMER: If only we had an Elon Musk to shrink the British state