Despite the disasters of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham this week, maybe Prime Minister Liz Truss has a cunning plan after all, suggests Ivor Gaber

I wonder who remembers the scene from countless Laurel and Hardy films in which Laurel turns to Hardy (or maybe it was the other way round) and says: “A fine mess you’ve got us into.”

Would it be beyond the bounds of fantasy to imagine Liz Truss saying the same to her Chancellor after the markets reacted to Kwasi Kwarteng’s non-budget with a gigantic raspberry.

Perhaps the least important measure it included, but politically the most toxic, was the abolition of the 45p tax rate on salaries above £150,000.

On any sane and rational basis and coming after the ending of the ban on bankers’ bonuses, this was a suicidal move – presumably done to enthuse and excite those “people who count”, the hedge fund managers and other potential Tory donors. But even they weren’t impressed and her MPs were decidedly unimpressed.

So much so, that she forced Kwarteng into a humiliating climbdown which soured the rest of this week’s conference. But the damage was done and it will take a long time for the Tories to regain their reputation for economic competence, something that has been their main electoral advantage over Labour in elections past.

Coming a week after what most observers saw as a successful conference for Keir Starmer and Labour, the poll ratings for Truss and the Tories dropped like the proverbial stone, some putting the Conservatives a whopping 33 per cent behind Labour which if replicated in a general election would reduce the Tories to just three seats (but that ain’t going to happen).

Perhaps you have read much of this before, but there’s another narrative in play which is sending out a rather different message from that of Truss “the Iron Lady 2.0” and, surprisingly, this is about how our new PM seems to be trying to re-establish friendly relations with the EU.

It began with Steve Baker, one of the hardest of hard Brexiteers and now a minister in the Northern Ireland Office, making a surprising admission and apology this week. Referring to the previous government he said that they did not “...always behave in a way which encouraged Ireland and the European Union to trust up… I am sorry about that” – words that were echoed the following day by his boss, Chris Heaton-Harris.

This is an extraordinary turnround but just as surprising has been Truss’s actions over the past day or two.

One of the Tories’ principle reasons for opposing Britain’s continuing membership of the EU was concern that it was becoming as much a political as an economic union. So when President Macron of France announced the convening of the first-ever meeting of the European Political Community in Prague, it was hardly a surprise when the government denounced this as a back-door attempt by the French to create an EU political union – even though it involved 12 countries that were outside the EU.

To add to the sense of distance from Europe, Truss, during her leadership campaign, refused to say whether Macron was a friend or a foe.

So it was to many people’s surprise, and the European’s delight, when Truss turned up in Prague for the summit and then spent time in clearly convivial talks with the French president after which she declared he was a friend

Clearly Britain and France can only benefit from a closer relation, whether it involves resolving the problem of the Northern Ireland border, the flow of cross-channel asylum seekers, fishing rights in the Channel, the war in Ukraine and so on.

A revival of the entente cordiale can only be welcomed.

But it does all beg the question “what’s going on?”.

Why has Truss the intractable become Macron’s mate?

I don’t know the answer but (based on a couple of off-the-record conversations) I could hazard a guess – which is, after all what most political commentators do most of the time.

And my guess is that Truss has now grasped the size of the economic and financial mountain facing her, and having looked at her poll numbers, has concluded that continuing fights with Brussels (which are moving close to a trade war over Northern Ireland) is one fight she doesn’t need.

READ MORE: What else we learned from the Tory conference

Presumably she wants to instead focus laser-like on the economy in the hope that sooner rather than later her ambitious (some might say foolhardy) dash for growth, will start to show results.

Should that happen, and should her poll ratings climb, then maybe the next election will not prove disastrous for the Tories – only just very bad.

l Ivor Gaber is professor of political journalism at the University of Sussex. He is a regular contributor to Times Radio and a former political correspondent at Westminster