The Tories are howling mad and blaming 'orthodoxy'

Expertise is still the enemy of the all-powerful, howling mad wing of the Tory party but they've got a new name for it: orthodoxy.

- TOM PECK

It is more than six years since, confronted with facts that entirely undermined his argument, Michael Gove declared he, and the people of this country had, "had enough of the experts with their acronyms" who disagreed with him. It was an outburst that made David Brent and "Finchy" declaring themselves the "real" winners of a quiz night, by throwing some shoes over a community centre, look statesmanlike by comparison.

It also turned the word "expert" toxic; in that those who continue to share Michael Gove's idiotic and entirely disproven view now know better than to repeat this particularly stupid phrase, so they've had to come up with another one. And that one is orthodoxy. A few days before Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss brought about the first ever entirely self-inflicted economic crisis, they sacked the chief civil servant at the Treasury, Tom Scholar, for being, in their view, the beacon of "Treasury orthodoxy".

Orthodoxy doesn't mean anything at all apart from experience, from making decisions based on evidence and an understanding of their consequences. For almost a full week now, I have described Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng both as having deliberately and accidentally crashed the economy, and found myself unable to conclude which is accurate, and this is because they are both accurate.