A new online magazine has launched – and it’s doing a crucial job. It brings together into one place a group of people all who, throughout the years, have been most relentlessly and consistently wrong.
Economic Affairs is the new publication of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the climate-sceptic think tank which provided the intellectual ballast to Liz Truss’s short-lived and economy-wrecking 45 days in office.
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The institute is now run by Daniel Hannan, the oddball former Conservative peer who got every single prediction about Brexit wrong – he predicted it would be such a huge success that other nations would be queuing up to follow Britain out of the door. Always with his finger on the pulse, earlier this year Hannan was bemoaning the decision by Harold Wilson’s government to introduce decimalisation of the UK’s currency in 1967.
Hannan’s predecessor as head of the IEA was David Frost, another former Conservative peer, Boris Johnson’s Brexit botcher and still the only man to quit Cabinet in protest at a deal he himself negotiated and signed. Frost stepped down after just three months in charge and is rumoured to be flirting with a move to Nigel Farage’s mob. If he jumps, it would make him Reform’s first member of the House of Lords.
Announcing the launch of Economic Affairs, the think tank boasted that “regular contributors include leading free market voice Matt Ridley”, noting that he is the “former chairman of Northern Rock”. It’s a bold thing to boast about, given that the most noteworthy moment of Ridley’s time at the Rock was when it experienced the first run on a British bank for 130 years. This led to his resignation and to the bank being bailed out by the government.
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The magazine will be edited by William Atkinson, a twenty-something tweed-clad assistant content editor of the Spectator, last seen in Rats in a Sack claiming that David Bowie was a Conservative (he wasn’t). Other exciting voices include yet another Conservative peer, the crackpot former minister John Redwood, and Alys Denby, opinion editor at the pro-Brexit City AM and a GB News brains-speaker, along with various other Tufton Street types.
In fact the only person they’re lacking is the only person who’s ever taken their views and pursued them in government wholesale – Truss herself. Surely they could persuade her to ditch her unwatched YouTube channel and pick up her digital quill?
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