Anyone hoping for any solutions to the UK’s economic misery from the Conservative Party Conference would have been sadly disappointed.

And surely not even Tory diehards should have been harbouring any such hope anyway, given the economic ineptitude of the current vintage of Conservatives.

We had the continuing defence of the indefensible - Brexit - from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Michael Gove.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt used the “Brexit” word only once in his speech to the conference, as part of what seemed like an elaborate but unamusing attempt to combine humour and politicking.

It was perhaps strange that Brexit did not form the centrepiece of Mr Hunt’s speech, given it has been the defining policy of the Tories in recent years and they promised it would help the economy (not that anyone should ever have believed that).

Then again, Mr Hunt was a Remainer, so perhaps it does not come quite so naturally to him as to Messrs Sunak and Gove to emit fantastical stuff about the supposed benefits of Brexit.

Not for the first time, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” tale sprang to mind as the Prime Minister and Mr Gove last week attempted to display Brexit benefits which actually remain conspicuous by their absence.

Clearly, of course, the Tories are gearing up for the next general election.

So it was probably not surprising that ideology was to the fore at the party conference.

That said, it has seemed for years now that blind ideology has been the most, and perhaps only, important thing to the Tories.

After all, how could they dismiss the huge damage done to the UK economy by Brexit if they were actually concerned about people and living standards?

What we also had at the Conservative Party Conference was another scary speech from Suella Braverman, Secretary of State for the Home Department, on immigration.

Her speech comes at a time when businesses the length and breadth of the UK, across a raft of sectors, continue to struggle with skills and labour shortages as a result of the loss, with the UK’s hard Brexit, of free movement of people between the UK and European Economic Area.

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We had the usual from Mr Hunt, who we must remember was a senior member of the Cameron-Osborne administration that began the UK’s ill-judged and damaging austerity programme and savage cuts in welfare benefits after coming to power in 2010.

Mr Hunt continues to sound like an austerity chancellor.

That did not stop him from hinting at the prospect of tax cuts, a thing that some of the Tory faithful have been slavering over.

Of course, he mentioned tax cuts in the context of freezing and then reducing employment in the civil service, another miserable development.

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Both Mr Hunt and Mr Sunak attempted to claim credit for the Tories for a fall in inflation which has resulted in large measure from base-year effects, and certainly not from anything they have done.

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The Bank of England has, rightly or wrongly, hiked UK base rates from a record low of 0.1% in December 2021 to 5.25% amid the UK’s inflation crisis. That hike in borrowing costs is precious little to do with the Tories though, surely, given the Bank has independence in setting interest rates through its Monetary Policy Committee and the UK’s 2% target for annual UK consumer prices index inflation is the same as it was when Labour was last in power.

What the Tories have done to limit inflation remains entirely unclear.

On the other hand, it is easy to see what they have done to fuel it. They have failed spectacularly to keep energy prices under control. And they have sent food prices and import costs surging through their hard Brexit.

What was clear from last week’s conference is that the Conservatives have no coherent plan to boost the UK’s economic growth, which is being hampered greatly by Brexit and limited by other poor policymaking by the Tories.

The Tories should be putting cash in the pockets of those on the lowest incomes if they want to stimulate aggregate demand and boost growth.

They have, since 2010, been doing quite the opposite, taking money away from those who need it most.

And, while they talk about economic growth, they do not really seem to care about it, or what it means for ordinary households.

The Conservatives would rather cherry-pick a statistic or two and thumb their noses at the likes of France and Germany, all the while trumpeting their anti-immigration ideology at a time when the UK is encumbered by a major speed limiter in the form of skills and labour shortages.

It is a sorry state of affairs. And it has been so for some time.

No one should have been expecting it to change. And last week’s Conservative Party Conference should have confirmed that unfortunate reality for anyone who was in any doubt about it.