Now we know the terrifying truth: the hardest part is yet to come

LIKE a bank manager ushering a profligate customer into his office, Rishi Sunak sat the nation down yesterday and calmly went through the accounts.

They made truly horrific reading. We already knew we were in a financial hole. Yesterday, we discovered just how terrifyingly deep.

To tackle the pandemic, the Government had shut down the country and wrenched open the spending hydrants.

The numbers contained in the Chancellor’s ledger of doom told their own grim story. The economy 11.3 per cent smaller than at the end of 2019, the largest fall in 300 years.

National debt spiralling to a terrifying £ 2.8trillion by the next election, more than a year’s output by the entire country. A borrowing binge, unprecedented in peacetime, of £394billion this year.

Record employment replaced by snaking dole queues touching a predicted 2.6million (although – a crumb of comfort – not as many as in the dark days of the 1980s).

If we hadn’t by this stage appreciated the magnitude of the Covid catastrophe, Mr Sunak drove it home.

The economic emergency, he warned gravely, had ‘only just begun’.

Of course, the Chancellor has been right to throw a protective arm around families and businesses, spending fortunes on furlough, loans and test and trace.

After all, none of this was their fault. Their lives were turned upside-down not through their own recklessness, but by a disease spawned on the other side of the world.

But even with a vaccine on the horizon, the post-coronavirus outlook remains frightening. The road to recovery will be long and torturous.

Mr Sunak – incredibly, only in post nine months – was calm in the face of the storm. He didn’t understate the seriousness of the situation, yet offered hope and reassurance.

Still, the Mail can’t be alone in feeling queasy that his solution to this towering financial challenge was to reopen his cheque book.

His sweeping ‘once in a generation’ plan involves spending £100 billion on railways, roads, super-fast broadband and superior mobile phone connectivity to get the country moving, as well as building new homes. This is shrewd: without a realistic chance of getting on the property ladder, millions will have no incentive to vote for the pro- capitalist Tory party. Whitehall coffers are boosted and £3 billion will help get the young and long-term unemployed into work.

True, Mr Sunak ordered a pay freeze for many state sector employees (prompting, predictably, howls of outrage from the hard-Left unions). Yet they still enjoy job security, paid holidays and gold-plated pensions those in the private sector, facing pay and job cuts, can only dream of.

But by giving a wage boost to the lowest paid, as well doctors and nurses, he has snookered Sir Keir Starmer, blunting his vapid attacks about Conservatives ‘poor-bashing’.

Moreover, a new £4billion ‘levelling up fund’ will give a shot in the arm to some of Britain’s left-behind towns, cementing the party’s support in ‘Red Wall’ seats won from Labour in the 2019 election.

One major question remains unanswered however: how will this spending spree be repaid?

This newspaper supports a small state, the free market and fiscal responsibility – not loading an unmanageable financial burden on to future generations.

The Chancellor could have been tempted to raise taxes to recoup some cash. We are pleased he resisted.

Rather than turbo- charging the recovery, this would be a drag on consumer spending power, enterprise, job creation and wealth generation at precisely the wrong moment.

Ten years ago, in the jaws of the global financial crash, the Tories created the conditions for a jobs miracle. Today, the Prime Minister will shackle the economy with ruinous regional restrictions until at least March.

It is imperative that the Chancellor looks beyond these local lockdowns and concentrates on unleashing the innovation and creativity of the private sector.

As he acknowledged in the Commons, only through a decade of repairing public finances, was the country strong enough to withstand the earthquake of coronavirus.

We must rebuild them again. But economic recovery is, as Mr Sunak says, a ‘common endeavour’.

Government can set the direction – but it must return to the traditional Tory ground of freeing up individuals and families to play their part.

After yesterday’s head- spinning performance, if there was any doubt about the monumental struggle this country faces to get its bank balance back in the black: truly the hardest part is yet to come.