But it would be a heavy psychological blow for a leader who ran her campaign, and has built her government, on the conviction that tax cuts and supply-side policies will reignite growth. Giving that up, Bale said, would vitiate the ideological rationale of her government and potentially turn her into a lame-duck leader until the next election, which she will have to call by early 2025.

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Sticking to her guns, which has been Truss’ response so far, leaves open the chance that Britain’s economy will pick up by the time she faces voters. But the stubborn threat of inflation all but guarantees that the Bank of England, Britain’s central bank, will keep raising interest rates. That will hurt people who need to refinance home mortgages and probably throw the broader economy into a recession.

Asked by BBC Radio Stoke about her fiscal plan’s impact on the housing market, Truss paused before saying, “Interest rates are a matter for the independent Bank of England”. She added that “interest rates have been rising around the world” and blamed much of the crisis on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

For the past few days, the bank has actually helped Truss by intervening in the market to buy British government bonds. That brought down interest rates and strengthened the pound, which had tumbled to its lowest level against the dollar since 1985. On Friday, the pound traded up to $1.11.

But the intervention, which was driven by fears of the damage done to British pension funds by the turbulent market, has put the Bank of England in an awkward position, economists said. It runs counter to the bank’s monetary policy of raising interest rates to cool inflationary pressures.

Beyond the tug of war between fiscal and monetary policy, critics say Truss faces a more elemental problem: Her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, has lost the faith of the markets in his economic stewardship.

That is partly because when Kwarteng announced the tax cuts last week, he did not submit the package to the scrutiny that a government budget normally receives. The fed fears that the tax cuts were “unfunded”, meaning they would not be matched with cuts in spending and so would require massive borrowing.

On Friday, Kwarteng and Truss met at Downing Street with officials from the government’s forecasting agency, the Office of Budget Responsibility – a move designed to signal they now welcomed the scrutiny. The office will submit its projections for the cost of the fiscal program and its effect on Britain’s growth on October 7, but the government will not publish the numbers until November 23.

For Truss, the political fallout from her program’s botched rollout has been profound. Political analysts point out that she won the support of only one-third of Conservative Party lawmakers in the first stage of the leadership contest. Now, the collapsing polls have left politicians angry, fearful and divided.

Unless the trends are reversed, many of the party’s members in Parliament will be swept out of their seats in the next election, particularly in the “red wall” districts of the Midlands and the North, where Truss’ predecessor, Boris Johnson, lured traditional Labour voters to switch to the Tories with his promise to “Get Brexit done”.

That realignment of British politics is in jeopardy. Goodwin said these voters did not want Truss’ low-tax, neoliberal economic policies. Adding to the alienation, he said, she was determined to relax immigration laws, another core issue for working-class voters.

“We’re seeing the complete implosion of the Conservative vote,” Goodwin said. “They’re losing middle-class voters who are alienated by Brexit, and working-class voters who are alienated by their economic policy.”

The New York Times