(Correction – The following is a reworking of a recent blog in which I misspelt the name of the Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng for which I apologise.)

When I was a child we had a black and white television with vacuum valves which had to heat up
before the set would operate. A common fault was when the horizontal hold failed, causing the
image on the screen to roll up or down making it impossible to watch.

At the back of the TV there were some small knobs that you had to twist to try to resolve the
problem. This, however, was fiddly and the turning so sensitive that the image rolling down the
screen would pause before changing direction and rolling up the screen.

When this happened, my dad, who had no training in electronics as far as I know, would start to
tap the side or the top of the TV. I often tried to identify a sequence to the tapping but it seemed
to me to be completely random, except that the longer it took to stop the image rolling the harder
the tapping became until my dad gave the set a solid slap to both the top and side.

The result of all this tapping and slapping was rarely positive. Turning the machine off and
allowing it to cool down, and then turning it back on again sometimes worked. But more often
than not we had to get the TV repair man out to fix the problem.

I was reminded of all this by the budget, which dare not speak its name, on Friday. Mr Kwarteng
seemed to be adopting my dad’s approach to fixing economic growth. However, he seemed to
have missed the gentle tapping stage. He went straight for the slapping stage and then
augmented this with a hammer.

Very occasionally my dad’s approach seemed to work. His disdain for the technical levers of
change and the approach of technicians, and his sharp rejection of advice were rewarded by the
sudden stabilisation of the picture…for a while.

If my dad’s engineering strategy failed and broke the telly the worst that would happen was that
we would miss Bonanza or Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Mr Kwarteng’s risk appetite
appears to be much greater. What is more he has made it clear he has not finished hitting the
black box of the economy, Friday was only the beginning.

We can only hope his unconventional approach, disregarding the views of the economics
profession, Treasury officials and basic arithmetic, works. However, I never had much faith in my
dad’s approach to fixing the TV. I have a lot less confidence in Mr Kwarteng’s approach to fixing
the economy.