No soft landing

I am haunted by an image, highlighted here by the consistently remarkable Wat Tyler of Burning Our Money, of the British economy as Wile E. Coyote in mid-air having just run off a cliff and not yet quite realising that in about a second, however fast he pounds his legs round and round, all that will be left of him will be a couple of plummeting vertical lines. Thereafter, there will be no more than a distant cloud of pulverised and silent dust on the canyon floor thousands of feet below.

It is a brilliant image, Gordo's devious ineptitude, hubris, conceit and deceit precisely summed up and skewered.

When I first read it, I only thought it funny.

Now I find it only properly frightening.

Because there's a catch. It isn't just the Bottler, 'our greatest-ever chancellor', freeze-frozen in that mid-air split-second of horrified doom.

It's the whole country.