Let’s hope you buckled your seatbelt, Kwasi Kwarteng – you’re about to experience more turbulence

One of the great and serene pleasures about a long-haul flight is that feeling that, once in the air and cruising high above the clouds, no-one can get you. If you’re lucky, then you’ll have turned left as you entered the plane – and you’ll have room to stretch out, enjoy a glass of champagne; settle into a nice escapist movie and a tasty meal.

I do hope that Kwasi Kwarteng, who needs the legroom and the respite more than most, flew back early from the IMF conference with just that sort of pampering – an all-too-brief interval of calm. Little did he know that his flight was being tracked by the media as if it had just been hijacked and the occupants on their way to Cuba.

The last time this sort of thing happened was when Priti Patel was heading back from Africa a few years ago, blissfully unaware she was to be sacked by Theresa May as soon as she touched down...

Our chancellor has had a tight few days – plenty of “turbulence” long before he became airborne. Out in Washington, Kwarteng looked distant from the centre of the economic action in more ways than one; trying to put as brave a face as he could on what was rumoured to be happening at home – the line-by-line evisceration of his first born: the mini-Budget.

He was said to be “nonplussed” about his old friend and ally Liz Truss (and officials) ripping up the radical “plan for growth” they had been nurturing for weeks during the Tory leadership campaign. Indeed, it was the culmination of their political project, one that was supported and incubated by the far-right free market think tanks known collectively as the Tufton Street mob. A decade on, and the supply-side revolution is being strangled at birth by one of its parents.

Kwarteng has been virtually insulted to his face during his curtailed sojourn in DC by the IMF chief, Kristalina Georgieva, who said her message to national leaders was: “Don’t prolong the pain... It is correct to be led by evidence. If the evidence is that it has to be a recalibration, it is right for governments to do so.”

No prizes for guessing who that was aimed at…

When he gets to his crunch meeting with the prime minister – I stress an old and close friend of his – it’s not going to be easy. For reasons of saving face and maybe sentiment, she probably doesn’t want to sack the bloke. They go back a long way.

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But for reasons of saving her own critically endangered skin and avoiding becoming a pub quiz question and laughing stock for the rest of her life, she also needs to stay in office a bit longer.

So, Kwarteng will be presented with a choice. Either he is humiliated by cancelling his/their mini-Budget; or he is humiliated by being sacked and sent to the backbenchers or swapped with, say, Penny Mordaunt or Simon Clarke.

A proud, indeed seemingly arrogant man, this will not be easy for Kwarteng to take, but he’d be wise to try and keep his job, get through the U-turn, watch the pound and gilts recover, and hope that something turns up that will prevent him and Truss becoming the briefest of footnotes in history.

If he could have stayed up in their air forever, sipping bubbly and gently dozing his troubles away, he probably would have done. Instead he’s heading for a crash landing.