WHETHER born of modesty, humility, or political acumen, silence has served Rishi Sunak well over these past few weeks. His withdrawal from the limelight after his defeat by Liz Truss in the summer meant that he was off-stage during his party’s worst act for many decades. Into this silence two words have been dropped, unity and stability, picked up in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prayer on Monday. It is clear from his Cabinet choices that Mr Sunak is seeking unity within the Conservative Party — but that is not the same as unity within the country. People who are struggling to feed their families or pay their rent or mortgages will feel little unity with the politicians who presided over the stratagems, Brexit the most disastrous, that exacerbated their financial problems, however much blame is put on President Putin. The sort of unity that the country needs at present — between right and left, Government and Opposition, labour and management — is hard to see coming about as Mr Sunak attempts to navigate between, say, a Chancellor determinedly on the left of the party and a Home Secretary who considered Ms Truss to be too liberal on immigration.

As for stability, Mr Sunak knows better than Ms Truss how little room he has to manoeuvre now that the UK’s cupboard has been shown to be so bare. She assumed that international financiers would be attracted to invest in Britain by the prospect of greater personal gain. In fact, only the hedge-fund managers who had the ear of her first Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, welcomed the opportunities that financial chaos creates. Mr Sunak and his inherited Chancellor know that financiers are not satisfied with their own wealth. They wish to see austerity imposed on others: the diversion of Government funds away from the support of economically valueless members of society and directed at large capital projects (such as those loved by Boris Johnson), accompanied by the suppression of labour costs. There are plenty of other countries in which to invest if they do not find those conditions here.

If this, then, is the stability being sought by the markets, whom Mr Sunak now needs to placate, what hope is there for the poor? When life is insupportable, change, not stability is needed, and the best mechanism for change is a General Election, when even economically valueless people have a little political capital to spend. Even if Mr Sunak delays an election until 2025, he will need to act soon to improve his party’s prospects, and his success with the Covid furlough scheme might, perhaps, give him leverage in a party ideologically opposed to “handouts”. We trust that his reticence is a sign that he has seen the damage caused by “hoping that things will magically come right”, the policy of his two immediate predecessors. He cannot talk his way into a sounder economy or a second term. He must be seen to act in the best interests of all the people now in his care.